The exhibition showcases recent works from the Sound Studies and Sonic Arts Master’s program at the Berlin University of the Arts during the span of two months. Each weekend offers an insight into the individual art practice of a student, creating an overview of the diverse, interdisciplinary field of the emerging generation of sonic arts. The theme of the exhibition invites us to witness various disparate works through the lens of decay, its potentials and constraints. What sort of strategies are there to both witness and work with decay? What if we were to think through decay, realising its hidden, complex potentials? Instead of avoiding, prolonging, or fighting against decay, how can we hold space for ambiguities?
There is a moment after something is conceived when it is still full of possibilities, multiplicities, controversies. Sentences, sounds, or images trigger our thoughts and propel us on a spiral of curiosity and excitement towards the unknown, raising the question: “What does this mean?”. This dimension of possibilities disappear when the unknown becomes known: accepted, repeated and circulated. According to the composer Herbert Brün, this is the process in which “A language gained is a language lost”. How do artists today deal with the unavoidable process of the decay of meaning?
Against a reduction of decay, we respond with the politicization of it: a way to think unheard and unseen possibilities in worldbuilding and its undoing.
Location: Zwitschermaschine, Potsdamer Str. 161, 10783 Berlin
PROGRAM:
19-28. January: archiving the azan in the indian subcontinent by Nithin Shams
2-4. February: Landscape, Memory and Time: Waves by Yu-chin Chen
9-11 February: Again, but not the same by Thomas Lea Clarke
23-25. February: Houses by Miguel Caldas
01-03. March: Altitude Sickness by Donatas Norušis
08-10. March: wait till ~ by Kika Echeverria
16. March: DECAY Finissage – Performance evening