Sound installations
Soundshapes – In Between Frequencies
Volume I
Janine Jembere, Untitled (from the series Residence Time), 2013. Courtesy: the artist
Soundshapes – Inbetween Frequencies is a moving series of sound works installed across the entrances and in-between spaces of art institutions. Drawing on the potential of porosity, the project thrives to destabilise the divide between inside and outside, pushing the static nature of architecture into a resonating body.
The immateriality of sound allows it to travel across material borders, while its manifestation depends on the materiality of a surface at the same time. As the artist Pallavi Paul states, “The physical properties of sound are more worldly than light. Light can travel in a vacuum, sound cannot. It clings to objects, it clings to people, it clings to things.”
Considering the specific circumstances of each presenting institution, the series tests how sound can shape space without altering it physically, engaging with possibilities of institutional permeabilities.
Soundshapes – In Between Frequencies is a project conceived by Julia Grosse and Carolin Köchling. Its first iteration Volume I was presented at Gropius Bau. Soundshapes – In Between Frequencies: Volume I activated the two entrances of Gropius Bau with sound works by Kapwani Kiwanga and Janine Jembere, creating an acoustic connection between the central entrance portal of the neo-Renaissance building and the step-free entrance.
Janine Jembere: endurance – a sound shower
18 October 2023 to 14 January 2024
Janine Jembere conceived a new work for Soundshapes – In Between Frequencies: Volume I. It consists of phrases that are uplifting, encouraging and empowering, collected by Jembere from friends and colleagues in different languages. This collectively authored, multilingual piece tackles language in its capacity to build relations amongst us, going far beyond one’s individual ability to decipher the meaning of words.
Jembere recorded the phrases in her own voice. Although making the effort to pronounce the words appropriately, her pronunciation is broken in many cases. For Jembere, this “broken pronunciation” raises questions around the colonial and imperial domination of language as well as the imbalance between those who speak in their mother tongue and those who speak a language learned later in life.
Kapwani Kiwanga: 500ft
31 July to 16 October 2023
How does architecture control the physical movement and psychological state of humans? In her sound piece 500ft, Kapwani Kiwanga puts different disciplinary tools of built environments and colonial strategies of separation into relation. Drawing from her research into public institutions such as hospitals, prisons and urban spaces, the artist traces how disciplinary architectures travel and mutate across times and geographies. A recurring motif is the way in which the interior is shaped in response to the exterior in an effort to govern human behaviour and nature. The title of the work refers to the minimum distance between areas designated for the local population and those for European settlers in the French colonies, defined during the International Conference on Colonial Urbanism (Paris, 1931).
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