This year and beyond, Sound will become an integral feature of the Haus Der Kunst’s programming, with a series of in-house music residencies, a new sound commission that will permeate the Terrace Hall for one year, a sonic identity for all original HDK online content, and various sound happenings taking place throughout the year in correspondence with ongoing exhibitions.
In 2021, the artists invited to take part in the new sound programme are investigating, through their own distinct practices, the ways in which sound flows through, intersects and alters the realm of the material. Working with histories both communal and personal, real and imagined, these artists weave sound into mythic tapestries, creating sensual conduits where new stories are told and new feelings felt. They conjure the unknown to challenge the conditions of perception, demonstrating how sound can both orientate and disorientate.
By using sound’s power to directly shape experience, tell stories, and create connections, these artists find themselves with a distinct world-making ability, and the works they will share reflect the care with which they wield that ability. Sound is the most primary of the senses, and yet sound is also the form of expression that is most easily denuded of its contexts, allowing it to move freely across and through cultures, constantly being recoded - exploited and often used to exploit.
When care is given not just to read sound but to be affected by it, to live within it for a time, it reveals itself to us in its fullness. It has an immensely physical character, and simultaneously connects us to the ethereal. The artists in this year's programme bring forward these possibilities of sound.
From the physical effects that sound waves have on matter itself, to the ways in which disputed genealogies of sound temper our experience of it, the field of sound is wide open for artists willing to contend with its possibilities. Once a month Haus Der Kunst will host a musician for a short residency of 2-3 days, where they will be invited to share different strands of their work and research, in different formats, and across different spaces in the museum
The new acoustic commissioned work by artist and musician Lamin Fofana will be installed in the Terrassensaal from June 2021 to March 2022. Additionally, he will be creating acoustic pieces to accompany all of Haus der Kunst's online content, and will also host multiple acoustic events within the museum. The presentation of his work adopts a radically new approach, intertwining the museum's internal activities with its online presence – thus, leaving a lasting impact of acoustic influences on our memory.
Live Programme 2021
- 7. & 8.7. Nkisi
- 8.7. Lamin Fofana
- 23. & 24.9. Kelman Duran
- 8. & 9.10. Chuquimamani-Condori & Joshua Chuquimia Crampton
Artist info
Chuquimamani-Condori
Chuquimamani-Condori is an artist and musician of the Pakaxa Aymara nation, who has also released work under her state name, Elysia Crampton Chuquimia. Her work focuses on questions of sovereignty, physics, and queer resistance, interweaving the past and present in a tone that both celebrates and mourns the “cacophony of the first aurora.”
Chuquimamani-Condori’s releases are knotted with traditional Aymara knowledge and praxis, including the notion of the dead “re-speaking” with the passage of each song as well as taypi or the center where “spacetimes co-mingle” as an attestation of nonlinear time and inseparability. Her sounds emerge between the horizons of American west coast post-minimalism as well as autochthonous Andean Aymara music, and her recent LP, ORCORARA 2010 (2020), originally debuted at the Biennale de l'Image en Mpuvement 2018, interweaves acoustic guitars, droning synthesizers, piano and spoken word.
Joshua Chuquimia Crampton
Joshua Chuquimia Crampton is an LA-based Aymara guitarist, composer and multi-media artist whose most recent releases include 4 (2021) and The Heart’s Wash (2020), a full-length project of solo guitar compositions that are as meditative and wandering as they are viscerally raw and immediate. He is the brother of Chuquimamani-Condori (Elysia Crampton Chuquimia).
Kelman Duran
Kelman Duran is a sound and visual artist, curator and DJ. His work is driven by a deep empathy for disenfranchised groups and the struggle against inequality and racism, and is a critique of the civil architecture that both creates and propagates these issues. Whether through his intimate portrayal in his film work To The North of the desperation of a Native American community in South Dakota, or through his music where he interweaves samples from Notorious B.I.G’s Suicidal Thoughts to draw a parallel between the wretched conditions in inner-city ghettos and life on Indian reservations, his work is a constant poignant reminder of these themes. In his music you can hear dembow, hip hop, dancehall and most significantly a low slung reggaeton, all pushed through a haze of reverb and delay to create an amorphous and hypnotic sound that often holds a certain sadness.
Lamin Fofana
Lamin Fofana lives and works in Berlin as an artist and music producer. He grew up in Sierra Leone and Guinea, moved to the USA in 1997 and to Germany in 2016. He became known both in the field of electronic music and visual art.
His electronic instrumental music connects ideas of Blackness, migration, displacement, and race with something otherworldly, and brings nonlinear thought and experience into focus.
Nkisi
Nkisi is the stage name of Melika Ngombe Kolongo, an electronic musician, producer, and visual artist currently based in Berlin and London. Her innovative sound has been presented at many solo and group exhibitions all over the world. For Nkisi, sound is a portal to various forms of experience and comprehension and has a great unifying power. Her performances consist of overlays of African rhythms, hard European dance tropes, and synthesizer melodies. They command electrifying energy.