Winta (Wintana) Hagos.
Winta (Wintana) Hagos is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist working across sound sculpture, light, installation, and spatial composition. Her practice explores how sound can move beyond the audible and take physical form through water, light, architecture, living organisms, and responsive technologies. Working with cymatics, biofeedback, field recordings, archival sound, electronics, and sculptural environments, Hagos creates installations where vibration can be seen, inhabited, and felt.
Rooted in Eritrean and Ethiopian histories and East African sonic traditions, her work is concerned with memory that exists beyond conscious recollection. She considers what we inherit through the body, family, sound, ritual, and environment, and how experiences from previous generations might continue to surface within us. Her research draws from epigenetics alongside oral histories, archival recordings, and embodied practices to think through inheritance without relying solely on the conventional archive.
Wellness practices are central to this research. Through sound healing and Yoga Nidra, Hagos works with theta and delta brainwave states as spaces for deep listening, dreaming, and accessing forms of memory that can be difficult to reach through conscious thought alone. These states inform both the making of the work and the environments she constructs, where sound, light, water, and vibration become tools for shifting perception.
Technology functions throughout Hagos’s practice as a means of making these relationships physical. Her installations have used plant biofeedback, cymatics, responsive lighting, water, spatialized sound, and sculptural systems to translate signals between bodies, materials, and environments. Her work brings contemporary technologies into conversation with ancestral knowledge, asking what can emerge when different ways of knowing are allowed to occupy the same space.
Hagos is currently the first Artist-in-Residence working with Dr. Ola Mohammed at York University’s Black Sonic Cultures Research Lab, where her research explores Black sonic cultures, embodied listening, and experimental sound practices. Her installations and sound works have been presented in Toronto and internationally, including projects with Nuit Blanche Toronto, Lumière: The Art of Light at Ontario Place, Gallery TPW, Xpace Cultural Centre, and Home Office in New York. She is also Creative Director and Director of Programming at It’s OK* Studios, a Black-led interdisciplinary arts space in Toronto, where she leads artistic programming, curatorial direction, and interdisciplinary cultural projects.