GROUP
Sonic Insurgency Research Group (SIRG) is Josh Rios, Anthony Romero and Matt Joynt.
Our research-based performance and exhibition practice examines normalized associations between criminality and sound, silencing as a form of social control, and voicing as a form or social resistance. Considering how noise comes to be defined and the conditions under which definitions of noise are mobilized to maintain authority over marginalized communities, SIRG investigates the politics of sound and sound’s relationship to policing while contesting institutionalized epistemologies. By placing academic scholarship on sound in proximity to experimental performance, political speech, dialogue, and other acts of sonic audacity, SIRG highlights what kinds of auditory experiences are understood as acceptable and what kinds are understood as antagonistic in the struggle over political, economic, and social equity.
SIRG’s group work has been exhibited in Counterpublic Triennial at Luminary Arts (St. Louis, MO), Acoustic Resonance at Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA (Portland, ME), State of the Art 2020 at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis, MO), Work for the People (Or Forget about Fred Hampton) at Co-Prosperity Sphere (Chicago, IL), in Sonic Terrains in Latinx Art at the Vincent Price Art Museum (Los Angeles, CA), and at Locust Projects (Miami, FL).
SIRG’s writing has been featured in ON Journal’s Rules and The Design Studio for Social Intervention’s Spacial Justice. Our ongoing series Conversations on Sound and Power is available on the art and activism platform, MARCH. Currently, we are working on a writing project, “Sonic Index: An Abbreviated and Critical Glossary of Sound and Power,” for Creative Times Headquaters’ as part of the Sonic Commons, their thematic year of programming and exhibitions about sound, power, and public space.
Josh Rios
Josh Rios is faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he teaches courses in visual critical studies and research-based practice. As a media artist, writer, and educator his projects deal with the histories, archives, and futurities of Latinx subjectivity and US/Mexico relations as understood through globalization and neocoloniality. Recent projects and presentations have been featured at The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha), the Blue Star Contemporary (San Antonio), Konsthall C (Stockholm), DiverseWorks (Houston), and The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Overland Park). Recent publications include “Mythic Sonic Beings: A Multitrack Conversation” in Situated Listening, Attending to the Unheard (2025), “Photographs from the Fields: The Digital Activism of the United Farm Workers,” co-authored with Deanna Ledezma in Reworking Labor (2023), and “What is Justice to the Dead? On Sabra Moore’s Reconstruction Project” for the exhibition catalog Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities (2022).
Anthony Romero
Anthony Romero is a Boston-based artist, writer, and organizer committed to documenting and supporting artists and communities of color. Recent projects and performances have been featured at The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha), the Blue Star Contemporary (San Antonio), and the Mountain Standard Time Performative Art Biennial (Calgary, Canada). Publications include The Social Practice That Is Race, coauthored with Dan S. Wang, and the exhibition catalogue Organize Your Own: The Politics and Poetics of Self-Determination Movements, of which he was the editor. He is Professor of the Practice at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, Boston.
Matt Joynt
Matt Joynt is a Chicago-based composer and artist whose work engages the multivalent political histories of sound, sonic archives, and sound as site. His composition projects for film have premiered at Sundance Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, IFC New York, SXSW Film Festival, and The Gene Siskel Film Center and have been featured extensively in media work for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and PBS Independent Lens. Collaborative projects - as a member of InCUBATE and with Josh Rios and Anthony Romero - have been exhibited at The Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Smart Museum of Art (Chicago), Luminary Arts (St. Louis), Autzen Gallery at Portland State University (Portland), The Devos Museum at Northern Michigan University (Marquette) and Columbia College Center for Book and Paper Arts (Chicago). “The Siren and Social Space: an Essay in Fourteen Stanzas”, written with Josh Rios, was published in the third issue of ON Journal, Rules and Spatial Justice from The Design Studio for Social Intervention, Boston.