HYENAZ are sonic alchemists Mad Kate and Adrienne Teicher, who create interactive performances and audiovisual art on the nexus of bodies, power, and audibility.
Their decade-long project Foreign Bodies is a series of encounters designed to meet people as relational bodies: bodies in motion, in migration, and in resistance. The work unfolds across various sites of movement and struggle: migrant transit points, refugee camps, detention centers, ancient caves, working mines, indigenous lands, alternative communities, activist encampments, and shelters. Through both volunteer work and collaboration, they recorded interviews and made field recordings to understand these contexts through a sonic lens — to listen to oral histories and ambient soundscapes, to engage with the dissonant and dissident frequencies that reverberate through these liminal spaces.
The work challenges the paradox of the body in late capitalism: while a myth permeates that the body is disappearing–made redundant by robots and AI, saddled with futurist fantasies of digital transcendence–the body continues to appear and reappear, on the borders of nation-states, in factories and logistics hubs, as an eye glued to an app. HYENAZ exposes the contradictions of extractive regimes that feed on human flesh while proclaiming its obsolescence, and as such the body remains a critical site in which to observe and resist these life-destroying modes of existence.
At Hamburg’s Kampnagel Theatre, HYENAZ camped on institutional grounds, dissecting art’s entanglement with extractive economies. Later, in Italy’s Murgia region—guided by historians, speleologists, and storytellers—they listened to stones as geological bodies, mapping echoes of deep time as a mode of resistance to capitalism’s frenetic now. The spiral finished at a protest camp opposite the Bundestag in Berlin where activists kicked up dirt with their shoes and wheelchairs, beating drums and chanting “Free Palestine”.
Foreign Bodies has spawned multiple offspring: Ex-Situ (2023) is a generative sound installation created with griot-descended musician Yusuph Suso, maps the body’s fractured relationship to homeland(s), past and future, which premiered at Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theatre. Perimeter (2023) is an audiovisual work and VR documentary that probes the paradox of belonging: what it means to hover “not quite outside, yet barely inside” identities, homes, or ideologies. The work was launched at Come Alive in Utrecht. Grievability (forthcoming) processes the horror of mediated violence in the context of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
With Inbetweens, HYENAZ have created eleven ambient audio works that wove deconstructed dance music with voice memos from thinkers and collaborators including Erin Manning and Thomas F. DeFrantz.
Beyond Foreign Bodies, the pair have collaborated with artists like Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi [crazinisT artisT] (Eku Eku Eku: a call to death) and PEACHES, birthing the dance collective Clusterfuck for her riotous revue “There’s Only One Peach with the Hole in the Middle.” For Sivan Ben Yishai’s award-winning theatre texts Du verdienst Dein Krieg and Unsere Stadt aus Vogelaugen, HYENAZ dissected themes of complicity and alienation through contorted field recordings and live vocal manipulation.
In live contexts—whether Berghain, Royal Festival Hall, or SXSW—HYENAZ conspire with their audience to oversaturate control systems with unruly flows of sound and affect. From the slime-strewn choreographies of Knowbody (Maxim Gorki Theatre) to the alienated ecstasy of Automine (Prague’s Cross Attic, Berlin Performing Arts Festival), their stage works are not spectacles but feedback loops returning energy to bodies sucked dry by modern life.
Press
HYENAZ is a project that disintegrates borders, torpedoing the dividing lines between music and performance.
Patrick Wildermann, Tagesspiegel
“Performative Monster Duo”
PEACHES
[In] the performance of Hyenaz…. everything is water, so we are people, water bodies, all connected…. It’s not a blurred vision, but a hyper-vision.
Simone van Saarloos, De Groene Amsterdaamer