Wake (2025)

Wake by Aga Paulina Młyńczak was commissioned by Cryptic and shown at The Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow. Expanding on the original 2022 piece, the artist presents it as an exhibition featuring a new sculpture and sound work that mixes traditional with procedural audio composition. The sound comes in various textures such as field recordings of rain, vocal performance, and onomatopoeias, playing with the linguistic nuances between Slavic and Germanic languages and utterances that move from one sonic imprint to another. 

Wake, the eponymous work, draws on environmental soundscapes and vocal syllables recorded in Riga (Latvia), in Wrocław and the Lower Silesia region (Poland), Sofia (Bulgaria), and Glasgow. Arising from these distinct geographies, the sounds form an imagined history of language in flux – shaped by migration, movement and exchange.  The work explores the resonant interplay between language and landscape, tracing connections of a shared linguistic ancestry rooted in Proto-Indo-European origins from which many European languages evolved. Throughout the installation, sails transport sounds of natural phenomena across the gallery, bringing language, landscape and movement into relation.

At the heart of the gallery, a central sculpture, of steel, brass and a contact speaker anchors the exhibition. It plays a vocal composition that bridges field recordings collected from disparate geographies, interlacing language-specific inflections with vocal mimicries of the environments explored.

The various aural elements explore themes of population displacement and historical erasure in Eastern Europe. The work is also shaped by artist’s relationship with a peer from East Germany, founded  on a shared family history in the region of Lower Silesia- situated on opposing sides of the Second World War. Some of the field recordings include brief fragments of conversations captured along the journey to find friend’s old family home, decades later, in what is now a foreign country. 

Through the interplay of voice, environment, and history, Wake investigates how sound can articulate the intertwined legacies of language, migration and cultural memory.