Xenia Benivolski is a writer, curator and educator working at the intersection of sound, visual art, and material culture, with a focus on musical instruments as political and historical agents. She is currently a PhD researcher and FWO fellow at LUCA School of Arts, KU Leuven, where she studies the ideological and material histories of musical instruments, particularly bells, across shifting colonial and post-Soviet geographies.
From 2021 to 2023, she curated You Can’t Trust Music (YCTM), a digital program at e-flux, commissioning texts and performances by artists including Ryuichi Sakamoto, Nicolás Jaar, Felicia Atkinson and Steve Reich. She is co-organizer of VESSELS, a research and performance project with Rachael Rakes that positions instruments as material witnesses. In 2022, she co-directed The Weapon of Theory as a Conference of the Birds with Ayesha Hameed, Suzanne Kite, and Jota Mombaça at the Banff Centre for the Arts.
Recent projects include a research fellowship at the National Gallery of Canada (2024) on the colonial histories of carillons and bell towers, and public lectures at Lund University, Kunsthall Trondheim, Tate Modern, CCS Bard, and Harvard University. She regularly contributes to Frieze, The Wire UK, Texte zur Kunst, and e-flux. From 2013–2017, she was co-director of 8eleven, an artist-run gallery in Toronto.
