This exhibition is supported by Polish Cultural Institute New York

site-specific sound installation  for Wave Hill, The Bronx, NY

curated by Rachel Gugelberger

SOUND ON 

Bloom ( 2025)

wood ear mushrooms, thread, artist’s hair, copper rods and tape, Poland Spring water containers, water, rust, industrial debris, magnets, rocks, biomaterial sheets on windows, space heaters, speakers, ESP32, Mac Mini

This interactive sound installation addresses the urgent issue of environmental injustice. Nine sensors are linked to real-time data from air quality monitoring towers across New York City. As visitors move through the exhibition, they activate sounds of breathing that are modulated by fluctuations in the data. When pollution levels rise, the breathing becomes faster and heavier. The soundscape shifts throughout the day, reflecting changing air conditions and differing readings from each tower. The work highlights how low-income communities and communities of color are disproportionately affected by pollution—making these inequalities both audible and embodied.

“Magdalena Dukiewicz’s practice is rooted in materials and processes that probe the intersection of the organic and the industrial. In her immersive, interactive sound installation Bloom, she transforms the Sun Porch into a futuristic, dystopian urban landscape where “bloom” oscillates between the vitality of growth and the spread of bacterial and industrial contamination. Here, bloom is not only a sign of life, but also a signal of toxicity and transformation.

Dukiewicz transforms the sound of breathing through data sonification—modulating it with real-time fluctuations in air quality parameters from New York City’s monitoring towers. The result is an abstract, cacophonous soundscape that evokes discomfort and unease.

Flower-like sculptures in Poland Spring jugs of rainwater, rise from a junkyard assemblage. Their petals are hand-stitched from wood ear mushrooms—long valued in traditional Chinese medicine for detoxifying the body and nourishing the lungs—and connect to copper-filament stems topped with anthers felted from the artist’s own hair. Across cultures, women’s hair carries deep symbolic weight: beauty and femininity, strength and defiance, spirituality and rebellion. In botanical anatomy, the anther—part of the stamen—the male fertilizing organ of a flower produces and releases pollen, a life-bearing act here recast within a polluted ecology.

The windows and skylights of Bloom are covered with a skin-like, semi-translucent biomaterial made of collagen, glycerin, and deep red organic dyes, evoking blood and bathing the entire room in a crimson penumbra. Over the course of the exhibition, heat and dryness cause the membrane to shrink, crack, and peel, gradually revealing glimpses of the surrounding gardens, woodland, Hudson River and the Palisades. This slow unveiling heightens physical awareness, underscoring the body’s intimacy with its environment. Conjuring both blood and breath, contamination and transformation, Bloom is a meditation on the porous boundaries between the human body and the natural world—a work of resilience and renewal within ecological cycles.

Set within the manicured gardens of Wave Hill in the predominantly white and affluent neighborhood of Riverdale, the installation sits in stark contrast to the adjacent South Bronx, where asthma hospitalization rates—driven by environmental racism—are among the highest in the nation. Concentrated truck routes, waste transfer stations, and industrial facilities have produced dangerous levels of PM2.5, a pollutant linked to respiratory and cardiovascular disease; South Bronx children are hospitalized for asthma at up to fifteen times the rate of those in wealthier areas like Riverdale." – from curatorial essay Rachel Gugelberger

Interactive Programming by Ruimin Liang

MAGDALENA  DUKIEWICZ