Medea(s) – Tskaltubo is Eve Aboulkheir’s speculative sonic study of the Medea sanatorium in Tskaltubo, a Soviet-era spa town in Georgia. Her new work draws on recordings she made inside the vacant building, later transformed on a modular synthesizer, together with ARP 2500 sounds recorded during a residency at INA GRM in Paris.

Here, she arranges these materials into open structures, using spatialization, reverb, and filtering to shape them in real time. Tonight marks her U.S. debut.

The city of Tskaltubo, founded on bubbling hot springs, once welcomed hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens on state-prescribed holidays every year. Workers arrived with government-issued vouchers for rest and treatment, while members of the political elite came to enjoy the same mineral waters. Among its many sanatoriums was Medea, completed in 1962, an imposing classical structure whose colonnades and blue archways embodied the ideals of health and prosperity. After the Soviet collapse, the complex was abandoned and later became a refuge for people displaced by the war in Abkhazia, leaving it caught between grandeur and ruin.

Aboulkheir traveled to Tskaltubo last April. “I approached Medea as a succession of listening points,” she says. “The distant croaking of frogs, heard from inside, overlapped with the creaking of doors; the same frogs, heard up close by the pond, now mingled with air currents through the colonnades and the slamming of doors on the upper floors.”

For the French composer, Medea is a place of ambiguity: monumental architecture gradually overtaken by nature, suspended between care and neglect. Even its name resonates, recalling the ambivalence of the mythic Medea—between healing and poison, order and drift—that mirrors the building’s condition today.

Eve Aboulkheir (b.1991, Paris, France) is a sound artist and composer based in Paris. She uses field recordings gathered in specific sites, blending them with synthetic textures. Her work often begins from lived experiences of perceptual disturbance—moments when sensory input falters and the world seems to slip. Her compositions emerge from that instability, inviting listeners into in-between zones where meaning destabilizes.

She has performed at CTM Festival, Berlin; MaerzMusik, Berlin; Sonic Acts, Amsterdam; Out.Fest, Barreiro; and Elevate, Graz, among others. Her projects include Venus Road, inspired by a nocturnal journey through Singapore’s MacRitchie Reservoir, where forest sounds seemed to sync with the pulse of the city.

Releases include Hypnagogic Walks (KRAAK, 2023) and 22/12/2017 Guilin Synthetic Daydream on GRM Portraits (Shelter Press, 2023, split with Lasse Marhaug), a piece first presented on the GRM Acousmonium. Aboulkheir studied at Villa Arson in Nice.

Presented in partnership with the Graham Foundation and the Chicago Architecture Biennial; additional support provided by Villa Albertine Chicago, the French Institute for Culture and Education