Magda Stawarska-Beavan was born in Poland, she lives and works in the UK. She is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice is primarily concerned with the evocative and immersive qualities of sound. She is interested in how a soundscape orients us and subconsciously embeds itself in our memories of place, enabling us to construct personal recollections and offering the possibility of conveying narrative to listeners who have never experienced a location. She works predominantly with sound, moving image and print, often connecting traditional printmaking processes with digital audio.
Amongst Stawarska-Beavan’s recent projects exploring the shifting sonic and visual identities of cities are Translating the City (2019) Resonating Silence (2019), East {hyphen} West; Sound Impressions of Istanbul (2015), Seas Apart – Bosphorus (2018), Who/Wer (2017), and Kraków to Venice in 12 Hours (2013). They not only reveal intimate glimpses of the singular urban soundscapes of places but also interrogate their cultural complexities, exploring the blurred boundaries between public and private and probing the notion of physical and political borders as points of connection and signifiers of separation. Through her collaborations with other artists and writers and their “retelling” of her audio collages, her work explores the process of ‘inner listening’.