Christina Kubisch’s first exhibition in Portugal
The German artist exhibits her works for the first time in Portugal. Serralves receives the exhibition that explores sound.
Until April 2022, the Serralves Museum in Porto will host the first exhibition, in Portugal, of the German sound artist Christina Kubisch. The exhibition is part of a set of projects that explore sound.
Composer and sound artist Christina Kubisch started a career in 1970 and is distinguished by sound sculptures and installations, among other fields. He started his artistic work with the Italian artist Fabrizio Plessi, one of the founding fathers of video art.
Kubisch brings to Serralves three installations in which natural children mix with synthetic ones and silence is heard.
The exhibition begins with a new version of “The greenhouse”, from 2017, and shows the artist’s work around electromagnetic induction and the mixture of natural and synthetic offspring. An inspiration that comes “from the tradition of the 19th century, when they brought plants from the colonies, but only the visual part, never the children”, said Christina Kubisch to the Lusa agency.
“It’s not electronic music, created artificially, it’s all recorded live, even the electromagnetic fields are emanated by screens, light systems, etc.”, continues the artist.
In the Porto exhibition there is also “Projeto Silence”, from 2011, which frames the recording, in 70 languages, of the word “silence”, with visual representation of these sonograms, but also of the work “4” 33 “” “, by the composer American John Cage (1912 – 1992), himself a pioneer in random and electro-acoustic music using unconventional instruments.
In the end, visitors encounter “Brunnenlieder”, a meeting between natural children and popular music in the form of “Ein Brunnen vor dem Tore”, which is part of Friedrich Müller’s “Winterreise” cycle, set to music by Franz Schubert and with piano arrangements by Franz Liszt.
The works on display bring together a series of principles that assist the artist’s work in a “dilution of boundaries between the visual and the sound”, said curator Pedro Rocha.
The exhibition advises the use of headphones and, according to Pedro Rocha, “invites [o público] activating the work, moving in space.” Pedro Tutela’s exhibition, inaugurated in September and which brings together more than 30 years of work, using “the plasticity of sound”, also belongs to this group of projects. projects by artists Ryoji Ikeda and Tarek Atoui will also be exhibited in Serralves.