Documentation by Emma Dudlyke,Turning Space Launch — Wrangel66, Berlin, 2026, featuring artworks by Brad Nath and Aleksandra Nazarova.
23 January 2026
Turning Space launches with a sound performance by Aleksandra Nazarova, followed by an artist talk exploring how orientation is shaped through movement and attention, as sound crosses thresholds, corners, bodies, and hierarchies.
The event coincides with the exhibition unlived present, with works by Aleksandra Nazarova, Brad Nath and Niki Danai Chania. Curated by Niki Pielsticker, the exhibition forms part of Vorspiel (CTM / transmediale).
For its inaugural event, Turning Space hosted a conversation between artists Aleksandra Nazarova and Brad Nath, moderated by its founder, Catriona Collins. The discussion opened with a pointed question: what are our expectations of sound? To guide attention through verbal or non-verbal cues, or to become a reliable aid that focuses our minds and our bodies? And what happens when sound refuses to do this work?
In the artworks presented as part of unlived present, sound operated across multiple registers, through audio emitted by the works and through the movement of their bodies. Within the fairly controlled space at Wrangelstrasse 66, the presence of Nazarova and Nath’s artworks contended with each other, producing a multi-layered soundscape.
Collins observed that, in a moment when much of our experience is mediated by infrastructures we sense but cannot directly perceive, sound emerges as a charged medium through which scale, instability, and relation can be felt and explored.
Nazarova discussed sound as a means of rendering vast systems tangible, speaking about her research with the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) and the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM), institutions responsible for monitoring the Earth’s rotation and maintaining atomic time. Her work stages this drift between planetary motion and human time scales by adopting mechanical anchors — rotation, bell strikes— against soundscapes in which temporal misalignment can be sensed.
Nath traced a history through robotics and the engineered dog, from DARPA-funded experiments at MIT’s Leg Lab to Boston Dynamics’ quadruped machines. Set against the longer arc of canine domestication — selective breeding, labour, obedience, tail docking — robotic bodies reveal how agency is negotiated across interdependence and servitude.
The conversation also addressed technological advancements on a broader scale, such as large-scale computation and AI, and how they are growing more complex and increasingly operate beyond human perception. Notably, three interlinked frameworks are often used to describe this condition: abstraction, extraction, and – arguably – distraction.
Speaking to how agency shifts between bodies and systems, the conversation concluded that a particular kind of uncertainty emerges. Our relationship with technology operates within systems whose behaviour is often unclear: uncertainty on how something will act, whether it is responsive to our actions and needs, or even how we are meant to engage with it. Within this space of indeterminacy, Nazarova and Nath’s artworks exposed agency as unstable and contingent.
About Alexsandra Nazarova
Nazarova is an artist and designer working with material experimentation, space, sound, and scrutinising man-made and planetary systems. She plays with sonification, rotation, and recorded fragments to uncover how algorithmic infrastructures and sound shape our sense of time. In her work, a spatial installation gathers recordings that are modified until they lose their message and remain only as a ghost audio. Her practice has frictions between form, attention, and the systems that govern how we listen and relate.
www.nazarova.net
ig: sashanazrv
About Brad Nath
Nath is researching the relations between bodies, environments, and technologies. Through processes of reverse-engineering techno-optimist narratives, the work critically examines the forces shaping contemporary robotics and their implications. The practice involves developing articulated armatures and artificial fur suits that conceal, protect, or transform their internal structures. The history of the human–canine bond serves as a lens through which to understand tensions between breeding and design, cuteness and danger, friend and technology. The works give form to unsettling encounters of embodiment and uncertain terms of companionship.
About unlived present
unlived present was a group exhibition curated by Niki Pielsticker. The exhibition featured work by artists Aleksandra Nazarova (live), Brad Nath and Niki Danai Chania, alongside an Turning Space artist talk and a sonic hunting workshop with plusplusplus.live. Opening on 16/01/2026, the exhibition formed part of Vorspiel / CTM / Transmediale 2026.