Anton Kats

Anton Kats works as an artist and musician. His practice draws from the everyday, shaped by the south Ukrainian neighbourhood of Satellite Island in Kherson. Leaving Ukraine in 2000 to claim asylum in Germany, Kats’ work is driven by displacement and the navigation of legal status in Europe through education. He was awarded a practice-based PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London, and was invited to documenta 14 where he initiated the Narrowcast House and A-Letheia projects.

Working across sound, music, performance, radio, publications, and research, Kats develops installations, object-based projects, stage works, and collaborative formats. These take form through learning environments, exhibitions, migratory contexts, and listening infrastructures. He refers to this trajectory as Sonic Antifascism, exploring sound, music, and listening as active agents in antifascist cultural work.

Kats’ projects take shape in both self-organised and institutional contexts. These include commissions and long-term, site-specific projects in museums, galleries, biennials, clubs, music festivals, and radio platforms. Such projects include ‘Listening Hymns’ at Refuge Worldwide in Berlin, a performative spoken word archive and live series, and Grounded Outer Space People, a nomadic music ensemble and artist residency developing site-specific projects and performative exhibitions.

As ILYICH, his reclaimed middle name, he works across jazz, electronics, avant-pop, and spoken word. Their work extends into theatre and scoring.

Kats’ work has been presented at documenta 14, SAVVY Contemporary, the 10th Berlin Biennale, Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Serpentine Galleries, steirischer herbst, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Bergen Kunsthall, The Showroom, Kochi Muziris Biennale, and Sophiensæle, as well as Sonic Acts and Roskilde Festival.

Current Work / Research:

Kats is currently developing and exploring Sonic Antifascism, a practice-based artistic research project that asks how sonic practices can contribute to antifascist cultural work.

It approaches fascism not as a fixed historical period but as an ongoing continuum shaping relations of domination.

The project positions sonic practice, the interplay of sound, music, and listening, as a central methodological frame. Rather than treating sound as an object, it relates to sound as an active agent within artistic research. Collaboration with artists and musicians working in contexts shaped by war, migration, and displacement forms a key component.

Through field research in Ukraine, sonic collaboration, and writing, the project develops a manuscript and publication framework with Archive Books, Berlin. Sonic material, conversations, and rehearsals function as both artistic production and research documentation.

The project extends earlier works including After Hope and Sudnozavod, and contributes to the articulation of sonic practice as a political and organisational strategy.

Teaching:

Kats’ teaching is grounded in sonic practice as a method of artistic research. Listening is emphasised as an active, generative and critical practice, including listening for what the work wants to become. Students are invited to develop practices that treat listening as a concrete, haptic process, which materialises over time in the form of experiences, objects and relationships. Studio work extends into performative, transceiving and critical presentation contexts. Approaching sound, music, and listening as interrelated practices, Kats explores different modes of experience and learning through formats such as sound labs, radio work, and performance-based projects, with a focus on transmission as a question of agency: who transmits what, to whom, how, and why.

Student sessions combine studio work, listening practice, reading, and discussion. Students develop their work through iterative processes that move between composition, reflection, and contextual research. Students are encouraged to situate their work within historical, political, and social contexts and to be specific. They are also encouraged to engage with an expanded ecosystem and community of practice.

The intention is to encourage the development of specific, self-reflective practices that can be situated within current planetary conditions.