Indonesian artist Tintin Wulia’s sound installation Untold Movements Act 1: Neitherland, Whitherland, Hitherland (2015), which recently premiered at Sydney’s 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, is chilling in the almost casual way that it immerses the audience in a world of fear, conflict and uncertainty—specifically, the kind that is experienced by refugees worldwide. At the 4A Centre, 32 channels of synchronized audio, with orchestrated human voices speaking in several different languages, are interspersed with the eerie staccato sounds that one associates with short-wave radio frequencies, which fill the darkened gallery space. Loud speakers, along with synchronized flashing lights attached to black drapes that hang from the ceiling, add to the overall sense of disorientation and confusion.

Untold Movements builds on Wulia’s earlier sound work entitled Babel (2013), which interweaves poetry spoken in several different languages to create a miasma of sound that explores global nomadism—especially in relation to that of the Middle East. Here Wulia has taken the process further, spurred on perhaps by the constant scenes of chaos that are shown daily on television of displaced people fleeing war zones, and struggling for freedom as they press against borders. Some refugees are allowed through, while others are refused; some countries open their borders, while others keep them firmly closed.

At the core of Wulia’s practice is a reflection on how global borders determine the movement of refugees, which has become one of the 21st century’s most pressing problems. According to a recent report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, in 2014, 59.5 million individuals were forcibly displaced worldwide as a result of persecution, conflict or human rights violations. In Untold Movements, the use of texts and poems read by a variety of voices in several languages allows the audience’s imagination to fill in the gaps regarding the meanings of the largely foreign dialogues, and sense the feeling of fear, confusion and displacement that lies beneath the spoken words.