by Marley Heltai // Mar. 19, 2024
‘The Breath of a House is the Sound of Voices Within,’ takes its title from the words of American artist and architect John Hejduk. The quotation sets the thematic tone of the exhibition and allows us to enter a realm filled with installations that feel like personal talismans. With 35 projects by the JUNGE AKADEMIE’s fellows, the exhibition and its performance program unfold into a rich landscape of diverse voices and invite an intimate connection with the artistic positions resonating from within the Akademie der Künste’s walls. Each piece is vastly different from the next, a testament to each artists’ distinctive style and a nod to the theme’s open-ended and poetic nature.
One of the most compelling aspects of the exhibition is the interactivity of many of the installations. While not every work allows for direct audience engagement, many pieces invite us to, quite literally, step inside them. Whether through the use of headphones blasting enigmatic musical compositions, obscure instruments beckoning to be played, or the phonetic alphabet provided by sound artist Nina Dragičević to aid our understanding of her own language, we are invited to engage with each piece on a more tactile and personal level.
At three-and-a-half meters tall, Mahsa Aleph’s ‘myth of a house’ towers above the other installations and perhaps best embodies the exhibition’s title ‘The Breath of a House is the Sound of Voices Within.’ The outside is a makeshift shed compiled of rusty corrugated tin collected from discarded building materials in the outskirts of Tehran. Approaching the work, one can see the hand woven tapestries hanging outside of the dimly lit shed, adorned with large Arabic writing. The house-like structure has two entrances. The back entry can be accessed by passing through a thick black curtain.
Here, we step into a dark room with a few steps leading up to a series of peep holes carved strategically into the black wall. Through these holes, we can look into the other half of the shed. In contrast to the poorly lit and unobtrusive back part of the house, the front room is illuminated by a soft glow and is full of people. Watching the fellow exhibition visitors through the wall’s small openings, we have the impression that we are spying or seeing something we shouldn’t. It is thus no surprise that Aleph’s piece is a commentary on the feeling of otherness created by established gender roles and the relevance of who is allowed to see what, especially in places like Iran.
After only a short while, a sense of discomfort seeps into this voyeuristic arrangement. Descending the stairs, I make my way out of this room and around into the other one. Here, my entire viewpoint was flipped upside down. The ceiling is made to look as though it were the floor and the walls are angled outward and covered in a series of multi-colored upside down doors. The details of this installation force us to analyze our positions in a very real way, both within the space and, conceptually, in how we navigate power structures.
Nearby there’s a large wooden cylinder, low to the ground and stacked with pillows. A revolving door of visitors come to rest on the makeshift bed and listen to the mix of music coming from one of the many pairs of headphones attached to the wooden structure. Here, we can choose to sit up and observe the exhibition’s sprawling selection of works surrounding us while listening to Sol-i So’s four musical compositions, or as most likely intended, we can lie down on our backs and stare up at the colorful flags decorated with intricate drawings, hanging from the ceiling. On the wall next to the installation is a small thank you to people from a variety of different cultures, whom Sol-i So credits as greatly influencing her unique musical language. This multicultural inspiration is evident in her music, as it defies classification, merging Central European folk with soul or Asian musical philosophy with English poems.
On the other side of the dimly lit room, a wall is illuminated by a large screen playing a film titled ‘daniel’s destruction.’ The short film by director and video artist Yannik Böhmer is based on a true story and follows a young man walking through the streets of Berlin en route to a dating app hookup. As we watch the long take of titular character Daniel striding through the cold Berlin night, his story is simultaneously being narrated to us by what is presumed to be a future Daniel. As he walks us through his plans for the night, his depiction of a drug-fuelled marathon of gay sex also serves as a commentary on the sometimes dark reality of Berlin’s queer party scene. While visually simple and straightforward (the whole film is just a handful of long takes), the narrative explores some of the more detrimental underlying themes of hookup culture and the prevalence of drugs within the queer club scene. Overall, the video installation deals with particularly upsetting topics but it manages to maintain an air of vulnerability and a deeply personal feel, in line with the rest of the exhibition’s intimate pieces.
More than a mere collection of disparate artworks, the exhibition acts a sanctuary of diverse expressions and shared stories. The title of the show gains renewed significance, as the bodies and movements referenced in the works enter into playful dialogue with the architecture of the spaces that enclose them. The echoes of the many artists’ voices linger in the air, a testament to the significance of finding community through the intersection of universal themes and personal narratives.
Exhibition Info
Akademie der Künste
Group Show: ‘The Breath of a House is the Sound of Voices Within’
Exhibition: Mar. 1–Apr. 1, 2024
adk.de
Hanseatenweg 10, 10557 Berlin, click here for map
