Through the presentation of José Maceda’s groundbreaking Ugnayan 1974, Aki Onda brings a historic experiment in radio, sound, and collective listening into the present, exploring how music can move beyond traditional performance spaces and become part of everyday life.
At the Whitney Biennial 2026, Aki Onda brings a powerful historical work into the present with a renewed sense of urgency and resonance.
Born in Japan and based in Mito, Onda is known for exploring sound as a medium of memory, place, and collective experience.
For the Biennial, Onda presents Ugnayan 1974 by pioneering Filipino composer José Maceda, a groundbreaking composition created for 20 radios.
The presentation introduces a contemporary audience to a work that radically reconsidered where music could exist, how it could circulate, and who could participate in the experience of listening.
José Maceda’s Ugnayan 1974
Ugnayan 1974 was conceived as an expansive work that moved music outside the conventional boundaries of the concert hall.
Originally broadcast across Manila, the composition used layered recordings of voices, gongs, and traditional Filipino bamboo instruments transmitted simultaneously through radio stations.
Rather than gathering an audience in a single performance venue, the work allowed sound to travel throughout the city.
Radios became instruments.
Homes and everyday environments became listening spaces.
And the city itself became part of the composition.
Transforming the City Through Sound
The scale of Ugnayan 1974 fundamentally changes the relationship between music and its audience.
Instead of treating listening as an isolated experience between a performer and an audience inside a concert hall, the work creates something dispersed and collective.
Sound moves through neighborhoods and everyday spaces, connecting listeners who may never physically encounter one another.
The result is not simply a musical composition but a shared sonic environment.
Through radio transmission, Maceda transformed technology already embedded within daily life into a tool for collective artistic experience.
Sound, Memory, and Place
Onda’s presentation of the work decades later introduces another layer: memory.
Sound is inherently temporary. It unfolds, occupies a space, and disappears.
Yet recordings and transmission technologies allow sound to return.
By reactivating Ugnayan 1974, Onda brings a historical sonic experience into dialogue with another place, another institution, and another generation of listeners.
The work therefore exists simultaneously as history and as a new encounter.
Aki Onda and the Reactivation of History
Presenting Maceda’s work rather than simply documenting it allows Onda to treat history as something that can be experienced again.
The project becomes more than an archival presentation.
It is a reactivation.
A work originally connected to Manila enters the galleries of the Whitney Museum in New York, carrying its history while producing a different relationship with contemporary listeners.
That movement across geography and time reinforces many of the ideas central to Onda’s broader engagement with sound: memory, place, transmission, and collective experience.
Aki Onda at the Whitney Biennial 2026
Within the Whitney Biennial 2026, Onda’s presentation demonstrates how a historical artwork can remain active rather than becoming fixed in the past.
Ugnayan 1974 challenges the idea that music belongs exclusively to musicians, stages, concert halls, or conventional audiences.
Instead, sound becomes something that can circulate through public and private space, connecting individuals through a shared experience.
At the Whitney Museum of American Art, Aki Onda’s presentation of José Maceda’s Ugnayan 1974 reminds us that sound can connect communities, occupy space, carry memory across generations, and reshape how we experience the world around us.
Explore the Complete Tarik Talk Whitney Biennial 2026 Series
Tarik Talk created dedicated coverage of every artist featured in the Whitney Biennial 2026, with individual episodes exploring the artists, artworks, histories, and ideas shaping this edition of the Biennial.
The complete series—including videos and podcast episodes—is available across Tarik Talk’s podcast streaming platforms and social media platforms, offering a closer look at every artist featured in the Whitney Biennial 2026.
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With more than 200 episodes spanning over 50 seasons and recorded in more than 10 countries, Tarik Talk brings audiences inside museums, galleries, artist studios, art fairs, cultural institutions, and creative spaces while documenting the artists, curators, museum professionals, collectors, designers, and cultural voices shaping today’s creative landscape.
Through interviews, exhibition visits, artist profiles, and special documentary series, Tarik Talk explores the stories behind the art—connecting people, places, ideas, and creative communities across cities and countries.
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