Site-specifically developed for the former Busan Nam High School, Anomaly Index: Paracoustic Altar challenges categorisation and colonial logic embedded in the wax cylinder, one of the earliest sound recording technologies developed in the late nineteenth century. During the height of European colonial expansion, wax cylinders were used to record Indigenous languages, songs, and rituals under the guise of scientific preservation, incorporating them into colonial archives.

Following conversations and research with the Wiener Phono Museum in Austria, Nkisi turns her attention to the glitches, scratches, and ghostly utterances preserved within the wax cylinder. Rather than treating these distortions and anomalies as technical failures, she invites us to hear them as manifestations of energies that resisted capture at the moment of inscription.

The installation takes the form of a circular reflective platform holding a dense accumulation of wax cylinders. Beneath it, transducers transmit vibration directly into the metal, activating the entire structure as a single resonant body. What the alter emits is not the content of the cylinders but what surrounds and exceeds it: surface scratches, degraded playback artifacts, mechanical residues and even non-identifiable voices. By turning attention toward noise and erosion, the work refuses the colonial logic of extraction that produced these objects in the first place.