HYENAZ: EMBODIED. PROXIMATE.

HYENAZ are Berlin-based sound and movement artists Kathryn Fischer aka Mad Kate and Adrienne Teicher. The immersive performances, dance tracks, soundscapes, performative installations and a/v works they produce utilize the sonic shape-shifting of field recordings gathered in the process of site-specific works.

During lockdown, the pair developed a cross-genre audio work, music video, and VR documentary called PERIMETER which asks the question: what does it feel like to understand oneself as “just outside” and yet also “just barely inside” an identity, a concept, a philosophy, a group, a family, a home, a situation, a gathering. The VR gallery premieres at the Hexennacht festival on the 26th June, 2021.

HYENAZ are currently entering the research phase of their 4th work in the Foreign Bodies Series entitled Extraction, with support from Fonds Darstellende Kunste. Extraction examines extractivist practices in art and specifically within sonics and field recordings in order to develop better accountability practices. 

The last year has seen the duo collaborate widely with writers and artists to produce audio visual works including EKU EKU EKU, a collaboration with Ghanaian multi-disciplinary artist Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi [crazinisT artisT] with support from Goethe-Institut,, “Bodies, Figurations, Worlds,” a series of queer educational films by professor Antke Engel. In the summer of 2021, HYENAZ returned to the stage as musicians and sound designers for a performance of Sivan Ben Yishai's text "Unsere Stadt aus Vogelaugen / Eine Gegenwartsbewältigung im Dunkeln" at TD in Berlin, having premiered the piece at the Münchener Kammerspiele.

In 2019 they premiered their stage show “knowbody” at Studio Я - Maxim Gorki Theater, choreographed and directed a group of contemporary dancers called Clusterfuck for Peaches' epic stage revue, “There’s Only One Peach with the Hole in the Middle,” and designed sound for “Du Verdienst Dein Krieg: 8 Soldiers Moonsick” written by Sivan Ben Yishai and directed by Sasha Marianna Salzmann.

For the past seven years, HYENAZ have undertaken a music, performance and sonic research project entitled “Foreign Bodies.” At its core, Foreign Bodies is a slow movement journey that explores relationships of bodies in motion and bodies in resistance and interrogates the notion of the "foreign". They have visited refugee camps, squats, and intentional communities—prisms through which to examine the ways in which bodies move and collaborate in relation to, in resistance to, and despite management and control of their bodies/movement. In a series of audio visual works and performative interventions, HYENAZ examine and challenge the mechanisms that treat the body as a foreign object: a thing to be managed and controlled, an unknown territory even to itself, an “other” to be feared and annihilated.

Central to this project is the idea that the body is disappearing: from social interactions blasted into the corporate cloud, to machine intelligence tangled in the systems that govern life, to techno-futurists fantasies of an age where analogue flesh has vanished into digital consciousness. At this uncanny juncture, where surfaces look familiar but everything is shifting, HYENAZ have been working with the visceral body. 

Through their immersive live performances at spaces such as Berghain, Museum Modern Contemporary Art, Seoul and SXSW, HYENAZ have looked at the possibilities and importance of physical touch and wrestle with how the body operates inside new sets of seemingly opposing forces, ie "the virtual and the real.” Yet the arrival of a global pandemic has brought into sharp focus new conditions and limitations to physical engagement. It has created heightened awareness around the importance of redefining community and creative forms of "touch". HYENAZ welcome the challenge of continuing their practice of somatic based performance in these changing and alienating conditions.