Hajra Waheed at Kunstinstituut Melly.
14 April 2026
In ‘There Is a Fountain Even If Pale That Flows Beneath Us All’, Hajra Waheed invites us into a space of attunement where sound becomes both a method and a politics. Guest curated by Hera Chan and presented within Kunstinstituut Melly’s ongoing Call & Response series, the exhibition unfolds as a meditation on listening as a collective and embodied act, one that resists the conditions that seek to silence it.
Waheed’s multidisciplinary practice has long traced the entanglements of power, surveillance and displacement. Here, these concerns are rendered through a constellation of newly commissioned and recent works that move between drawing, painting, installation and sound. At its centre is HUM (2020), a multichannel sound work that foregrounds the voices of political prisoners, reframing them not as subjects of erasure but as agents within ongoing liberation struggles.
The exhibition’s title gestures toward a submerged current, a quiet insistence that persists beneath regimes of repression. In this, Waheed turns to the hum as both form and refusal, a sonic residue that exceeds censorship and circulates across bodies and geographies. Surrounding this are intimate studies and artist books that extend her sonic language into mark, line and landscape.
What emerges is not simply an exhibition, but a proposition. To listen otherwise. To remain with what reverberates.
This exhibition opens on 18 April 2026 at the Kunstinsituut Melly.
