In 1977, ‘No Future’ was less a lament than a provocation. With it, the Sex Pistols gave voice to the turbulence of their moment, to a mounting resistance within a Britain fractured by crisis and unrest. Today, the slogan registers differently: less as a taunt than as a cold recognition that the material and social conditions for a shared future are themselves under strain.

Yet punk exceeds both its moment and its genre. It is an attitude—charged with anger, urgency, noise, provocation, nonconformity, refusal and dissent—that extends beyond the 1970s and beyond an Anglo-American frame, persisting across diverse cultural and artistic contexts. In Aalst, punk and the underground endured well into the 1980s. Squats, rehearsal spaces and improvised stages operated as sites of self-organisation, where music, art and social experiment converged.

The logic of temporary infrastructures, loose affiliations and improvisation resonates in the work of contemporary artists who resist standardised regimes of visibility. Rather than submitting to institutional frameworks or fixed narratives, they move with instability: fragment, noise, interference. Sound operates here not merely as a medium, but as a means of articulating the unfinished—where continuity falters and representation meets its limits. As Christina Hazboun notes, ‘sound can be used to unsettle, create social formations (protests) and to increase the audibility of the unseen or the non-represented’.

Songs of Dissent takes sonic resistance as its point of departure. Sound appears here not only as witness but as archive—carrying traces of conflict, memory and collective experience—and as a practice often emerging from the underground and the embodied. It functions simultaneously as tactic and connective tissue: bringing people together and channelling energy—in protest, in shared acts of listening, in temporary alliances around a voice, a beat or noise.

‘No Future’ thus becomes less a position of defeat than an operational principle: to act without guarantees of progress, to proceed without deferred horizons. Artists turn to what is available in the present—situations formed in and through the body, in space and in the temporality of the moment. Within these constraints, other modes of imagination and action take shape: practices that do not wait on a distant, promised future, but intervene in the here and now, propelled by urgency, rawness and improvisation.

Co-productions with Kunstenfestivaldesarts, the Museum of Contemporary Art Roskilde, and Moderna Museet Malmö.

With the support of Institut français de Belgique (Embassy of France in Belgium) and the Mondriaan Fund.