Please note: most of our events are documented photographically and on video. As our visitors, you might be pictured in an identifiable manner. The Kunsthalle may use the resulting material for publication for information- and communication purposes, including on websites, social media or print products. By participating in events of the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, you agree to this.

extended
opening hours

During the exhibition Space Synthesis by Jan St. Werner, the Kunsthalle will be open until 10pm each Friday. Free of admission, visitors are invited to experience the changing lighting situation that is a central element of the exhibition.

kids workshop
sound worlds

Every other Sunday, 11am-12pm at the Fiepblatter Decay Store at the Kunsthalle (accessible through the café).

  • Sunday, May 21
  • Sunday, June 4
  • Sunday, June 18
  • Sunday, July 2

Jan St. Werner’s exhibition transforms the Kunsthalle into a giant instrument. Two very special loudspeakers throw a composition by the artist across the exhibition rooms. There they are deflected, for example, by a crooked wall or by one that hangs in the air and moves.

In addition to the very special sounds, what we see most in the exhibition is light and shadow, as large stage lamps cast our shadows on the walls. But much more happens through the ears: If we listen closely, we recognize tones that, for example, sound completely different in a large room than when they are reflected back from a wall.

Artist Tatjana Golder takes up the propagation of sounds in this special architecture and designs your own little instruments with you, which you can try out in the exhibition.

Sound Worlds encourages the exploration and investigation of one’s own senses and the creation of experimental sounds. The children should bring their own pictures (drawings or paintings) and small objects (such as old keys , small stones, small wooden sticks, etc.), which are then playfully assembled into moving sound mobiles. In the process, the children will think up a story to go with their pictures, for which they create their own sound worlds.

Participation in the workshop is free of charge. Registration at info@kunsthalle-baden-baden.de is required, indicating the date and name of the participants.

Further
program

Opening Weekend

The Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden invites you to celebrate the exhibition opening on Friday, May 5 from 6 pm onwards.

Friday, May 5: Vernissage & Party

  • 7 pm Welcome by state secretary Arne Braun
  • 7:10 pm Welcome and introduction by Çağla Ilk (Director Kunsthalle Baden-Baden and curator of the exhibition)
  • 7:30 pm Exhibition tour with Çağla Ilk and Jan St. Werner
  • 8:30 pm DJ-Set Nina Emge
  • 9:30 pm DJ-Set Andi Thoma (Mouse on Mars)

Saturday, May 6: Artist talks, Lectures and Lecture-Performances

  • 3 pm Artists and Scholars Michael Akstaller, Nina Emge, Gascia Ouzounian, Marcin Pietruszewski and Patricia Reed hold lectures and lecture-performances
  • 5 pm Artist talk with Jan St. Werner and Çağla Ilk
  • 5:45 pm Performance by the composer Marcin Pietruszewski

Michael Akstaller is a visual artist, scientist, and performer. In his artistic work he deals with relationships between sound and space and methods for expanding spatial perception via directed sound sources. In 2017, he initiated the class for Dynamic Acoustic Research at AdBK Nuremberg with Jan St. Werner, which has been operating as an independent collective since 2021. In 2022, he started a research project in collaboration with the Federal Institute of Hydrology on the Elbe River, investigating the influences of man-made underwater sound on the migratory behavior of fish. Akstaller has participated in numerous exhibitions and festivals and initiated independent curatorial formats such as Raststätte Frankenwald and Sometimes You Just Have to Give It Your Attention at the former Nazi party rally grounds in Nuremberg. 

Nina Emge (*1995) lives and works in Zurich. In her artistic practice she reflects social dimensions of voice, silence and listening practices. She completed her Bachelor of Arts with distinction at the Zurich University of the Arts. In Emge‘s practice, the debate around decentralisation, collective working methods and redistribution is present. This is evident in Emge‘s installations and drawings, her research and archival work, as well as in her often collaborative working and creation processes. Emge is an active member of the Transnational Sound Initiative, held lectures at the F+F Zurich and won several grants. In 2022 Nina Emge was invited to show her first institutional solo exhibition (It‘s never too late to) Stop, Look & Listen at the Halle für Kunst in Lüneburg. In 2021 she showed Reservatório / Behältnis / Container, a solo presentation at Les Complices* in Zurich. In addition, her works were part of the following group exhibitions, among others: Overture of Grief and Joy at Kunstverein Braunschweig, (2022), Performing Infrastructures at Zirca Space Munich (2022) Do you hear us? at Istituto Svizzero Rome (2021), Out now at Uferhallen Berlin (2021), Summer of Suspense at Kunsthalle Zurich (2020) and Do Undo Redo (decolonial thoughts) and Les Complices*, Zurich (2018).

Gascia Ouzounian is a sonic theorist who examines sound in relation to space, architecture, urbanism, and violence. She is associate professor of music at the University of Oxford, where she leads the project Sonorous Cities: Towards a Sonic Urbanism (soncities.org). Ouzounian is the author of Stereophonica: Sound and Space in Science, Technology, and the Arts (2021) and has contributed articles to leading journals of music, visual art, and architecture. Recent projects include Scoring the City, which takes inspiration from experimental music notations to develop new modes of “urban scoring”; and Acoustic Cities: London & Beirut, for which she invited ten artists to create works responding to the sonic, social, and spatial conditions of those cities.

Marcin Pietruszewski (born in 1984, in Poland) is a composer and researcher. He holds a PhD in Creative Music Practice from the University of Edinburgh and has taught at The Reid School of Music (Edinburgh College of Art, UK) and Design Informatics (The University of Edinburgh, UK). His texts have been published by Hatje Cantz and ZKM, among others. Currently, Marcin holds the position of the Leverhulme Research Fellow in Data Perceptualization and Aesthetics at the Department of Computer and Information Sciences of Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK. Pietruszewski is engaged in sound synthesis and composition with computers, exploring specific formal developments in the tradition of electroacoustic music and contemporary sound art. His works have been exhibited at West Court Gallery (Edinburgh, 2019), Remote Viewing (Philadelphia, 2019), and Institute of Contemporary Arts (London, 2017). Commissions include La Biennale di Venezia (2023), CTM Festival (2021), ZKM Karlsruhe (2018) and Deutschlandradio Kultur (2016). Collaborations include the sound installation Auditory Scene Resynthesis as Cochlear Wavepackets (HKW, Berlin, 2021) with Jan St. Werner (Mouse on Mars) und NORMIFICATION (Presto!? Records, 2023) with Florian Hecker.

Patricia Reed is an artist, theorist, and designer based in Berlin. Recent writings have been published in Ceremony: Burial of an Undead World, Sound – Space – Sense, The Unmanned, Pages Magazine, Glass Bead Journal, The New Normal, Construction Site for Possible Worlds, e-flux Journal, and e-flux Architecture. Reed is an affiliate researcher in the Antikythera program (US), and is co-head of The Critical Inquiry Lab at the Design Academy Eindhoven. She co-wrote The Xenofeminist Manifesto as Laboria Cuboniks, which was republished by Verso in 2018, with subsequent books in Greek, Korean, French and Spanish. A compilation volume of Reed’s works will be released by Holobionte Ediciones in 2023.

Sunday, May 7: Curators walk and talk & LP-Launch

  • 2 pm Çağla Ilk gives a tour through the exhibition
  • 3 pm Launch of the LP Space Synthesis, produced especially for the exhibition, followed by a performance

Weekend II

Sat, May 20 and Sun, May 21: Performance Spaint Chords in Public Spaces

  • 2 pm Spaint Chords in Public Spaces – Performance in public space with Jan St. Werner, Eva Borrmann, Michael Akstaller, Elise Ludinard and Rudy Schmidt

In this performative tape composition five custom-built loudspeaker panels emit five continually shifting frequency bands in narrow sonic beams. The panels are handheld by five performers who choreograph their movements to allow for exchanges between their frequencies and to evoke acoustic responses from the surrounding space. The piece mixes electronically generated material with recordings of instruments including saxophone by Mats Gustafsson, bagpipes by Erwan Keravec, percussion by Dirk Rothbrust and electronics by Jan St. Werner. The speaker panels were designed by Michael Akstaller. Composition, in this performance, also means an exploration of space through sounds in motion.

Spaint Chords premiered in April at the opening of the German Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale comissioned by Maria Eichhorn. In addition it was performed at Cukrarna Ljubljana, the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb and at Lenbachhaus Munich.

Performances begin Saturday and Sunday at 2 pm and Saturday additionally at 8 pm. The performances last about one hour. They take place in the surroundings of the Kunsthalle, meeting point is the foyer of the Kunsthalle.

Sunday, May 21: syntheticspace.de

  • 12-2 pm Livestream on syntheticspace.de

As part of Space Synthesis, the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden launches syntheticspace.de, a new web space that provides an additional visual layer to Jan St. Werner’s exhibition. syntheticspace.de translates the propagation of visually barely perceptible sound particles in the Kunsthalle’s exhibition spaces into a visual system that incorporates both the architecture and the visitors, while depicting how they influence this propagation. Through this additional digital layer, sound, space and bodies are brought together.

During the livestream on May 21, the exhibition spaces will be broadcasted live on syntheticspace.de between 12 and 2 pm. Meanwhile, visitors on site can follow their own presence live online and thus receive a visual equivalent of their physicality and its influence in the exhibition space. Visitors will not be personally identifiable, as the software used will merely depict their silhouettes.

For the finissage of Space Synthesis on July 2, the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden will host a digital symposium that will discuss the background of the project in more depth. More information will follow shortly.

syntheticspace.de was conceived by Damir Gamulin and Nikola Bojić, in collaboration with Jan St. Werner, Çağla Ilk and Dominik Busch.

Nikola Bojić is a designer, researcher, and educator exploring relations between space, technology, and future(s). His projects have been shown internationally, including Triennale di Milano, Venice Biennale, Taipei Biennial, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and ZKM, Karlsruhe. He was a visiting lecturer at ACT / MIT, where he co-taught an Advanced Studio on the politics of techno-scientific modeling. Bojić published the artist book The Excavations and edited an issue of The Life of Art Magazine on experimental cartographies. He teaches at the Academy of Fine Art in Zagreb where he initiated the collaborative curatorial platform remote-lab. He is an affiliate researcher at MIT and holds a master’s degree in Art history and Information sciences from the University of Zagreb and a postgraduate master’s degree in Design Studies from the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. 

Damir Gamulin is a designer and researcher with a background in Design Studies at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Zagreb. Integral to his overall practice are projects based on design research. These include graphic, interior, and architectural design, museum and exhibition setups, as well as digital and interactive design. This versatility has garnered numerous awards and Gamulin’s work has been featured in prestigious international institutions and various regional exhibitions. Intrigued by the intersection of technology, disciplines, and scales, Gamulin contributes to spatial design projects that explore the relationship between space and knowledge. Independently and in collaborations, Gamulin consistently seeks to develop innovative methods and digital tools for the integrated formatting, editing, and interpretation of physical and conceptual content, continually testing the limits of his craft.

Weekend III

Saturday, June 17 

  • Threshold – Lecture-Performance of the author and scholar Louis Chude-Sokei
  • Percuspection – Performance of the artists Dodo NKishi and Tunde Alibaba
  • DJ-Set: Louis Chude-Sokei

Sunday, June 18

  • Percuspection – Performance of the artists Dodo NKishi and Tunde Alibaba

Closing weekend

Saturday, July 1

  • more-than-human performativity, vibrational spaces membranes – Performance of the artists Nicole L’Huillier

By carrying a custom-made vibrational membrane microphone in one hand and a horn speaker in the other, the artist Nicole L’Huillier will lead a procession from the outdoor public space to the inside of the museum. The membranal microphone will be receiving different types of vibrations around it that will be outputted as delayed noise patterns through the horn speaker; diffusing a ghostly echoed and noisy signature of the place. Inside the museum, the membrane will receive the vibrations that emanate from the spatial synthesis and mediate an improvised spatial remix of vibrations, feedback, and crossed signals that convolutes the space, the sound, the membrane, the performer, and the assistants.

  • Party with Jan St. Werner and the space pop duo Breaking Forms (Nicole L’Huillier und Juan Necochea)