ECHOES. Skin Contact

­“An imagination as wide as the sea and as open as the sky above it” —Malibu

From January 30 to February 8, ECHOES. Skin Contact transforms Haus der Kunst into a site of live concerts, performances, and video installations, that investigate a collective coming-of-age in a digitalised world.

Across two weekends, artists Kara-Lis Coverdale, Ed Atkins, PILLBERT, 7038674567, Fine, Angel Dimayuga & Guests, Gabriel Abrantes, Invernomuto, OMSK Social Club, Adam Linder, Damsel Elysium, Lechuga Zafiro, STILL, and Malibu invite audiences into speculative and affective environments populated by AI infants, amphibian oracles, spectral avatars, and voices of remembered kin. Their works evoke heightened emotional states and ambivalent forms of attachment. 

ECHOES bridges the ideas that are explored in the exhibitions, from For Children. Art Stories since 1968 to the upcoming programme that engages with mutable feedback cycles—natural, electronic, and metaphoric. 

The first weekend of ECHOES opens with a new performance by Ed Atkins, a haunting incantation scrutinizing memory and self-doubt called All the Weight of the World. The weekend culminates in a Sunday night gathering hosted by artist and chef Angel Dimayuga, where shared food offers a moment of genuine felt intimacy and togetherness.

Running throughout the 10 days, Gabriel Abrantes’ multi-channel video installation Bardo Loops immerses viewers in a world of perpetual crisis, in which non-human beings grapple with distinctly human situations. In a similar vein, Adam Linder’s choreography Skin Contact presents us with two dancers who explore presence and connection, constantly switching between body and interface. 

The second weekend turns more explicitly toward our relationship with elemental forces. Damsel Elysium presents a performance centred on the four elements, while Lechuga Zafiro invites audiences into his dense rhythmic and timbral universe, composed from field recordings gathered across South America.

Now in its fourth edition, ECHOES continues to expand the boundaries between exhibition and festival, offering experiences that linger beyond the temporal frame of the event. This year, we are especially excited to celebrate PILLBERT’s new album together with Munich-based label Squama and present Triton, a two-year research project by Invernomuto (supported by the Italian Council Program 24). We will also inaugurate Our Br00d, a new research project on Al and care, which is supported by the Art & AI programme of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes and led by artist collective OMSK Social Club in collaboration with the Artificial Intelligence in Culture and Arts (AICA) Digitalization College at MUC.DAI, Munich University of Applied Sciences, as well as the Wavelab at the University of Music and Performing Arts Munich.

Skin Contact seeks this openness invoked by Malibu’s words, attentive to distance and closeness alike, and to the fragile, expansive spaces of meaningful contact. 

While ECHOES makes space for emotional experience diffracted through digital spaces, the monthly sound residency TUNE brings us to the present moment, the right here and right now, for an exhilarating experience of live music, with artists singing of both pleasure and pain in the face of the peculiar numbness that defines our present. Upcoming artists include New York, a music project by artists Gretchen Lawrence and Coumba Samba, followed by composer and multi-instrumentalist Angel Bat Dawid, and later musicians Eiko Ishibashi and Jim O’Rourke.

"ECHOES. Skin Contact" is curated by Sarah Miles and Sarah Johanna Theurer.

We thank our shareholders, the Free State of Bavaria and the Gesellschaft der Freunde der Stiftung Haus der Kunst München e. V., for their annual support of our programme. We further thank our major supporter, the Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung for their generous commitment to our work, as well as the Ulli und Uwe Kai-Stiftung and the Beisheim Stiftung (for supporting the "Third Place").