AUSSTELLUNGSHALLE ZEITGENÖSSISCHE KUNST MÜNSTER

Site of Silence
27 June – 27 September 2009
Opening: Friday 26 June 2009 7.30 p. m.

The Site of Silence
“It often seems as if daily life is accompanied by a cloud of inescapable noise, by an incessant urban din: traffic, planes, jackhammers, the clamor of myriad voices, the continuous ringing of phones. This ubiquitous annoyance of sound taxes the nerves, it seems impossible to escape. The last resort of the inflicted soul is the frantic search for solitude, seeking out a place of peace and quiet. The irrepressible longing for a place where our overwrought senses find a moment of relaxation and rejuvenation takes hold...  the search for a site where silence reigns seems to be the only way out,” writes Dr Gail B. Kirkpatrick, director of the Ausstellungshalle zeitgenössische Kunst Münster, in her curatorial concept. She has planned and, with her team, organised “The Site of Silence”, an exhibition combining quite different works of art that nevertheless have one thing in common: They all deal with the contradictory experience of silence.

Participating Artists
In the exhibition „The Site of Silence“, there are quiet installations and an incredibly loud one, there are sculptural objects, mural paintings, photographies, and an artistic archive. Each in his or her own way, the seven participating artists try to locate the site of silence, to make it accessible for perception. This can only be done by a dialectic approach: Silence needs noise, sound, and activity to be perceived – and its experience can induce a sense of profound peace as well as a feeling of agonizing deprivation.

Christian Geißler, born 1953 in Münster, lives in Münster
Suchan Kinoshita, born 1960 in Tokyo, Japan, lives in Maastricht and Münster
Germaine Kruip, born 1970 in Castricum, Netherlands, lives in Amsterdam
Kris Martin, born 1972 in Kortrijk, Belgium, lives in Ghent
Yehudit Sasportas, born 1969 in Ashdod, Israel, lives in Berlin
Andreas K. Schulze, born 1955 in Rheydt, Germany, lives in Cologne
Stefan US, born 1966 in Lohne, Germany, lives in Münster

Kris Martin
Kris Martin’s art work “100 Years” (2004) is a minimalistic object of sublime beauty – a perfect sphere donning a shimmering coat of bronze colour. Its appearance alone has the potential to set the viewer in a meditative state, its presence exuding a sense of utter quiet, creating a site where silence can be heard. But then it turns out that Martin’s object is a live bomb set to explode in the distant future – and calmness morphs into nervous anticipation. Martin’s art work evokes a sense of silence like the quiet before a storm, an energy of uncalculable force. Two other works in the exhibition, although of extremely different media, both portray an infinite, utter silence and quirkily reveal the profound conceptual nature of Martin’s oeuvre: “Spatium” (2009), a series of twelve photographs, and “BellsII” (2008), two bronze cast bells. The photographs, which look like pictures of an arid landscape, are actually close-ups showing the inside of the skull of a 13th century monk. The bells, joined at their rims like Siamese twins, refer to another level of meaning as well. Making them inoperable for any ringing sound, their connection becomes a symbol of forced silence. A fourth work by Kris Martin, a small, unassuming box resting on the floor, is called “Symphonie Nº 0” (2008). It houses a siren which creates a deafening noise when it is activated by cranking a handle – an abrupt alarm that represents an existential threat.

Stephan US
Beginning in 2002, Stephan US has compiled a large archive copiously documenting scholarly, musical, and phenomenological attempts of defining the state of “Nothingness” – a collection creating much ado about nothing. Along with this archive, the artist presents the new installative work “united silence” (2009) in which he experiments with the perception of the spoken word as an investigation of what silence is. US, who lives in Münster, has asked people who have a special relationship to silence (some of them are deaf, blind or isolated, others have lived through singular, harrowing, isolating situations such as torture) to write about their experience. Portions of these texts can be read in the exhibition. But first the viewer must subjugate himself to an isolating situation by placing his head in one of the darkened niches draped with insulating fabric on the outside of the black rotunda made especially for the exhibition. Inside this circular room, the remnants of the spoken voices of the authors can be heard on ten recordings. In a radical gesture, US has deleted all the sounds of the spoken word. What remains to be heard are the pauses, the stillness which gives the spoken language a temporal structure, and the accompanying sound of breathing which punctuates the silence.

Suchan Kinoshita
Suchan Kinoshita’s art is often involved with the materiality of sound, asking what sound has to do with listening and listening with the inaudible. An extreme state of listening to sound is created by her audio installation “passant” (2007), which is part of the exhibition “The Site of Silence”. A recording of a New York City express subway train is played every 30 minutes in the exhibition space. A roaring, deafening noise fills the room, obliterating all other sensual experience. When the train noise subsides, a sense of utter silence reigns. Here Kinoshita makes the dialectic of the experience of silence as a situation created by sound and no sound highly tangible.

Yehudit Sasportas
The video installation “The Clearing of the Unseen” (2009) by Yehudit Sasportas with its hand drawn, stark black and white images of a forest landscape projected onto six screens creates an environment of intense, pristine beauty and at the same time eerie, near-apocalyptic hostility. Out of jet black and blinding white areas, the illustrative shapes of bushes and trees (either alive with needles and leaves or dead, naked, without foliage), of swamps, streams, and lakes evolve in delineated contours of sharp detail. The unmodeled expanses of black and white appear like voids – moments of nothing – like an absolute sensual silence out of which the harsh forms of reality take shape and the intensity of life unfolds.

Germaine Kruip
The play of light and dark, shadow and physical form – “conjuring up substance in the illusiveness of reality” – these are the themes of Germaine Kruip’s fragile but intense sculptural installation “Counter Shadow” (2008). Four geometric aluminium forms hang free in a U-shaped, walled-in space which is illuminated by a bright daylight spot. They are the parts of an object that seems to be disintegrating: there is no obvious connection between the four floating elements. In the spotlight, however, the metal casts shadows that form the distinct shape of a square, rendering the absence of light almost more real than the material object. The physical object and its projected shadow seem to vie for the attention of the viewer – a play of shapelessness and form, of objectivity and immateriality is staged.

Andreas K. Schulze
Painted geometric serial forms – repetitive patterns – comprise the visual information Andreas K. Schulze utilizes for his reductive art works. For his in situ work in the AZKM, Schulze has painted the forms SHHSHHH... in a frieze across the long wall of the exhibition space. This grey blue band delineates the architecture, emphasising its spatiality. The minimal geometrical forms of the work „SHHHSHHHHSHHH (Dedicated to Miles Davis)“ can as well be read as the phonetics for the sound people generate when silence is called for. The painting is about the effects of the “quietest” of visual information and is also a homage to a composition Miles Davis published in the 1970’s on the album “In a Silent Way”: “SHH/Peacefully”.

Christian Geißler
Only when the world is quiet, the seemingly soundless becomes audible. Listening to the rain, hearing how the drops of water hit surfaces, is only possible by consciously pausing to concentrate on the sound. In Christian Geißler’s silent audio installation, drops of “rain” fall from the 5th floor balcony of the AZKM, simulating a moment of nature in her manner of operation. “When it rains…”, as the art work is called, thus creates a site where silence can be heard between the drops of falling rain. The installation plays with moments of expectation and fulfilment and is, in itself, the fulfilment of an expectation – the random timing of the raindrops creates its own, comforting rhythm.

The exhibition is generously supported by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

For further information, please contact:
Ausstellungshalle zeitgenössische Kunst Münster
Hafenweg 28 – Speicher II
48155 Münster
Germany
www.muenster.de/stadt/ausstellungshalle

Press contact details:
Verena Voigt_PR: kontakt@verena-voigt-pr.de
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