Xenia Benivolski

Xenia Benivolski is a Canadian writer and curator working with visual and sound art. Her work investigates the material and ideological lives of musical compositions and instruments as agents of political, spiritual, and territorial transformation, exploring how sonic artifacts register as living and sculptural forms; things with “thing-power”. Broader interests include the ontological status of instruments, the metabolism of monumental form, and the acoustics of memory and violence. From 2021 to 2023, she organized the digital program You Can’t Trust Music (YCTM) at e-flux, which included texts and works by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Sung Tieu, Felicia Atkinson, Nicolas Jaar and Ayesha Hameed, among others. She contributes regularly to Frieze, e-flux and the Wire.

Since 2025, she’s been an FWO fellow at LUCA/KUL in Brussels, where she looks at the broader context of organology and monumentalism. Forthcoming books include See Through Music (Silver press, 2026) co-written with Annea Lockwood, and the monograph On Glass, Metal and Worms (Wolke Press, 2026). Xenia has recently spoken about her work at Tate Modern, CCS Bard and Harvard University, where she is also a fellow in 2026.