Workshop
The Singing Project
Open singing on the summer solstice
Ayumi Paul composing simultaneity, 2021 © Ayumi Paul, photo: Debora Mittelstaedt
What if people met singing freely together?
What if an exhibition venue became a place of continuous song?
The Singing Project (2021–ongoing) is a collective practice and singing sculpture composed by Ayumi Paul, the Gropius Bau’s Artist in Residence 2022. Since its onset, the project has taken shape in a series of workshops, gatherings and an exhibition, hosting an open space to freely sing and listen to one another. The project continues to be present at the Gropius Bau in the upcoming years through a yearly collective singing workshops around summer solistce.
Contributing to knowledge systems that include intuition, imagination, body memory and dreaming as ways of being in the world, Ayumi Paul’s activations challenge linear narratives of relations.
Ayumi Paul is an artist, violinist and composer who explores the interdependency of phenomena through listening and engaging with the nonlinearity of time.
Trained as a classical violinist since the age of five, Paul’s interdisciplinary approach to exploring how sound influences perception dismantles limitations of what we see and how we relate to one another. Her distinctive artistic language incorporates materials such as paper, thread and sound recordings, integrating invisible layers of reality like vibration and imagination as spaces for communal creation. Although she works closely with scientific technologies, she consistently returns to the body and its inherent ways of sensing beyond rational comprehension. Her projects often manifest as new languages, rituals and heightened sensitivities, which can be immediately applied to everyday life.
Paul’s work has recently been exhibited at the National Gallery Singapore (2018 and 2021), Kunsthalle Osnabrück (2020), SFMOMA (2021), Auditorium Parco della Musica (2022), haubrok foundation (2023), Gropius Bau (2023) and Georg Kolbe Museum (2024), among others. In 2021, she was awarded a fellowship stipend by the German Academy Villa Massimo in Rome. The Singing Project, a collective practice and singing sculpture, continues to be hosted by the Gropius Bau in Berlin, where she was the Artist in Residence throughout 2022.