The Serralves Museum, in Porto, hosts the first exhibition of German sound artist Christina Kubisch in Portugal, from Tuesday to April 2022, which is part of a “constellation of projects” that explores sound.

There are three different facilities that integrate a “constellation of projects that invite artists who have experimented with sound“Noted the director of the museum, Philippe Vergne.

It includes the exhibition by Pedro Tudela, which opened in September, as well as artists Tarek Atoui and Ryoji Ikeda, who will arrive at the museum soon.

The show starts with “The Greenhouse”, a work from 2017 that is now presented with a new version at Galeria Contemporânea, and shows the artist’s work around the electromagnetic induction, mixing natural and synthetic offspring.

On a visit to a press, Christina Kubisch explained that the inspiration for that work comes “from the tradition of the 19th century, when they brought plants from the colonies, but only the visual part, never the children”.

For those visiting the exhibition, the headphones give access to “two atmospheres, one of field recordings, and another strange thing, that if relates to electromagnetic fields“.

It’s not electronic music, created artificially, it’s all recorded live, even electromagnetic fields are emanating from screens, light systems, etc. ”, explained the author.

The exhibition’s curator, Pedro Rocha, highlighted that, in that space, “the public is invited to activate the work, moving through the space”.

The chapel at Casa de Serralves receives “Projeto Silêncio” (“Silence Project”), from 2011, which combines engravings of the word “silence” in about seventy different languages ​​and the visual representation of these sonograms, but also of the work “4’33 ” ”, By composer John Cage.

Following what John Cage had already taught us about the impossibility of silence, Christina invites us to a material visualization and experimentation of silence as a concept and something cultural, not so much as an absolute experience, something always mediated by language, words, concepts ”, stressed the curator.

In “Brunnenlieder” (“Songs from the Fountain”), the natural children become known with “Ein Brunnen vor dem Tore”, a popular song that is part of Friedrich Müller’s “Winterreise” cycle, set to music by Franz Schubert and arranged for piano by Franz Liszt.

In Redondo das Cameleiras, next to Casa de Serralves, you can hear a composition that combine water children, but it is also an invitation “to listen to all the children who are around” that space, explained the artist.

That work “has to do with this notion of restlessness and silence” and “is part of a romantic idealization that began at the time of Romanticism” of “silence as something of the imagination”.

The various works on display “bring together a series of principles that support Christina’s work”, highlighted the curator, naming a “dilution of boundaries between the visual and the sound”. “We have a sound that is visually personalized and, at the same time, a visual component defined in terms of sound”, detailed Pedro Rocha.

For Phillipe Vergne, this exhibition “is very important”, because it assumes “a commitment to experimentalism”, which is “at the heart” of the action of that museum. “We cannot think about the art of today without the notion that the experience of art is to experience with the whole body”, stated the director of Serralves.

Christina Kubisch was born in Bremen (Germany) in 1948, and studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart and music and composition in Hamburg, Graz and Milan.

I never decided whether I wanted to be a painter or a musician. I painted for two years, they told me I would never be a good painter. It was the best advice I was given. I studied flute and composition, went into electronic music, in the 1970s cosmi with performances”, he said.

Developed electromagnetic induction techniques, solar energy and special light systems that work artistically. He has exhibited on his own in several countries and has works in the collections of museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. She was distinguished with several awards, highlighting the ZKM Giga-Herts, which will be awarded to her in November for her career.