Barend Engelbrecht
Engelbrecht is a Johannesburg-based artist and researcher working across sound art, field recording, video, installation, text, and performance. His practice investigates the relationship between sound, space, time, and urban experience, with a particular focus on Johannesburg. Engelbrecht approaches listening as a method of artistic research: a way to examine how places are inhabited, remembered, contested, and transformed. His work draws on sound studies, cultural geography, and spatial practice, often taking the form of recordings, installations, visual scores, listening exercises, and collaborative projects. By attending to sound, Engelbrecht foregrounds listening as a sensory window onto urban experience: atmosphere, rhythm, movement, proximity, exclusion, memory, and the uneven ways people occupy space. In this sense, listening becomes a form of spatial activism because it asks who listens, who is listened to, and how power shapes the conditions under which voices, sounds, and places are heard.
Listening Pathways
Listening Pathways emerges from a long-standing collaboration between Barend Engelbrecht, Tebogo Ramatlo, Prof Amira Osman, and the Tshwane University of Technology. The project documents African cities through sound, listening, image, and text, asking how urban life might be understood not only through what is seen, but through what is heard, remembered, and felt in motion. Drawing from field recordings, visual fragments, and situated observations across Johannesburg, Lagos, Cairo, and related sites of inquiry, this recombinatory archive invites visitors to assemble temporary pathways through the material by selecting three keywords.
Select 3 tags and click "generate"
Generated pathway
The Surface
The Surface refers to recent collaborative work by Die Ouderdom, an imaginary non-identitarian artist collective created in collaboration with Miron Andres. This work, entitled No Here, explores the juncture between place and non-place through sound, image, performance, and fiction, asking how sonic identities are formed, displaced, and potentially dissolved.
Beneath the Surface
A loose playlist of tracks, sketches, and sonic fragments gathered beneath the visible work. Listening back to past modes of production: fragments from an earlier self, shaped by older habits, tools, impulses, and ways of making. These selected works are not presented as complete statements, but as residues of process, held together as a small archive of listening into the past.
contact
sound.jhb@gmail.com