Subtexts

Exhibition in cooperation with Sound Studies and Sonic Arts of the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK)
Diego Behncke, Ignacio Briceno, Salomé Lubczanski & Juliette Collas, Hisako Nakaoka, Efthymis Naoumis, Julia Koffler, Salah El-Oweidy & Selim El-Sadek
/Free Entry

With the exhibition subtexts, students from the Master’s program Sound Studies and Sonic Arts at the Berlin University of the Arts are participating in the Dystopia Biennial for the first time. As part of the project seminar “Dys/utopian Realities” with Professor Georg Klein, seven works were independently developed, planned, and realized for the exhibition space of studierendenWERK at Potsdamer Str. Among various sociopolitical, perceptual-psychological, and epistemological themes, the intensified discussion around freedom of opinion and art in Germany since the Gaza war started plays a role here, gaining a particular resonance in the underground car-park space.

Works:

A

Tubbytronic Superdome
Julia Koffler
Installation with fixed-media two-channel projection, four-channel sound, synthetic grass, styrofoam

“Cuteness” as a concept emerged in the early twentieth century and its grasp on culture is becoming exponentially tighter. Tubbytronic Superdome speculates on a future propelled by the acceleration of cuteness, collapsing the object-subject divide and molding everything into its own adorable image. Focusing on the dissolution of speech into babbling baby-talk, the installation approaches the voice as a boundary that divides human and non-human in hegemonic imaginaries.

B

Negative Hallucination
Diego Behncke
Film installation, 16mm, black and white and colour, transferred to video

A film in which a hole wanders through a space, reenacting a vermicular excursion through phylogenetic katabasis; plot holes become tools of mereological egress, formalising anamnesis through negative hallucination. In accounts of this phenomenon, the subject experiences a gap in reality, actively erasing an object of perception while unconsciously taking into account its physical extension; in other words, the object is perceived into another realm of existence.

Negative Hallucination Diego Behncke (left),  Tubbytronic Superdome Julia Koffler (right), Photo by Georg Klein

C

Interpreter
Hisako Nakaoka
Soundwalk

A soundwalk that auditorily reflects on our otherness. Through this work, encountered in the context of a former underground car park, the audience is invited to explore people’s different acoustic worlds. People who are present in the same place at the same time hear different sounds, just as they see different things. We cannot know exactly how others hear sound, but can we bring our ears closer to theirs?

D

Το Καρναβάλι (The Carnival)
Efthymis Naoumis
Audio installation

Το Καρναβάλι (The Carnival) is an audio installation that poetically and symbolically addresses our present social and political dystopia. The audio material is based on a song originally written and performed by a choir of political prisoners at the Averof Women’s Prison during the Greek Civil War (1946–49). Here it has been recorded and sung by five arbitrarily selected people, forming a speaker choir; the aim is to connect the song and its context with the present, while providing a new way to examine its history and context.

E

MayRhythmOvercomeTheHorrorOfWriting
Ignacio Briceno
Audiovisual Installation

A surface in tension, a political threshold, a critical juncture at the brink of expression. In an economy of meaning, in which words are currency, you don’t write on a blank page but against it. Seized by an alliterative fever, this audiovisual installation breaks language down into the mechanics of inscription, for writing to emerge anew.

MayRhythmOvercomeTheHorrorOfWriting Ignacio Briceno, Photo by Georg Klein

F

Safe Space
Juliette Collas & Salomé Lubczanski
Multichannel sound and light installation

Urban remodeling and gentrification redistribute bodies in space in the name of security and modernity, often using light and sound to deter “antisocial” behaviors. For instance, in 2018 the Deutsche Bahn planned to use atonal music to keep homeless and drug-using individuals from staying in Berlin train stations. Safe Space considers the (im)possibility of defining the antisocial. It is an interactive installation that explores the tensions between comfort, safety, and autonomy. How do our bodies encounter the city? Who can find shelter in the cracks, and where?

G

The Sound of the Sea
Salah El Oweidy & Selim El Sadek
Mixed installation

Is it enough for us to repeat the numbers,
and put our faith in the image alone?
Is a love of the image a love of knowledge,
when facts do not sum up to the truth?
If seeing horrors makes us blind,
I’d rather stop the pictures.
How can the truth be seen,
when Gaza is more than an image?

The Sound of The Sea is an installation exploring how imagery can implicate the observer rather than keep them at a distance.

 

With support by studierendenWERK Berlin.

Place:

KUNSTRAUM Potsdamer Straße
Potsdamer Str. 65, parking house in the yard
10785 Berlin

Time:

Opening // Fr. 20.09. 2024 // 6-9pm
From Sep 20th to 29th // Fr-Sun 2-7pm
/ Free Entry