Christina Kubisch: The Emergence of Sound

Since the 1970s, sound artist and composer Christina Kubisch (b. in 1948 in Bremen) has worked at the intersection of visual art and music. Her practice combines composition, performance, drawing, video, and electronic music. This exhibition presents sound as a phenomenon that is forever reconstituting itself in the arrangement of bodies, materials, signals, and movements, and that can be experienced through their interactions. Sound is thus always an action: it manifests in a dynamic sensorial process that links the works on show here.

The Emergence of Sound is both the title and guiding theme of this survey exhibition, which encompasses works from the last five decades. The exhibition honours Kubisch’s pioneering work in the field of sound art, a genre that first became known as such in German-speaking countries in the 1970s. The focal point of the exhibition is the artist’s early performances, electromagnetic research, and the participatory artworks she creates.

The first part of the exhibition is dedicated to Christina Kubisch’s early performances and multimedia works, which are directly linked to the history of the Ludwig Forum: In the 1970s she was invited to present her performances in the Neue Galerie—Sammlung Ludwig (now the Ludwig Forum). At the time, Kubisch was progressively liberating herself from traditional concepts of music and art. She reflected on gender roles, used a combination of instruments, everyday objects, and bodies to open up new possibilities for creating sounds, and created new perceptual possibilities by combining a range of media.

In a section of one of the exhibition rooms, Kubisch’s early works are juxtaposed with works created by other artists at a similar time that were also included in the Neue Galerie’s video archive, which was already regarded at the time as a forum for interdisciplinary practices. In their convergence, it becomes clear that the use of multimedia to dissolve the boundaries between different art forms through the incorporation of body, sound, spatiality, and new technical possibilities and media was just as much part of the era’s paradigm shift as the dissolution of the distinction between art and life.

Beginning in the 1980s, and drawing on her own electrotechnical investigations, Christina Kubisch developed soundscapes that incorporate audience participation into the work. Electromagnetic induction, the possibilities of which she would explore in more depth in the years that followed, allowed her to render audible phenomena that otherwise lie beyond the limits of human perception. Christina Kubisch increasingly expands the spatial scale of her works, from wires installed on the gallery wall to expansive wire installations to immaterial works that see public space as a site for investigating action and sound. She not only activates exhibition spaces as living soundscapes, but also industrial buildings, forests, gardens, basements, and multi-storey car parks.

In the second part of the exhibition, this approach can be experienced in the installation Kupfergarten (2024/26), which was specially created for this site. The work stretches through both rooms and examines the pillars of the ubiquitous electrical infrastructure of our modern age, which pervades our everyday lives, mostly unseen. Kubisch reflects on the materials used to construct it, critically examining the use and manufacture of wires and revealing the dark side of the extraction of the copper they contain. In the braided, taut, and coiled wire installations of the Kupfergarten, we encounter field recordings from natural areas located near copper mines, electromagnetic sounds generated in public spaces, as well as field recordings from wire factories and electrical substations. In the installation, sounds are created as audience members move through the space and are transmitted and mixed by special headphones in ever-varying ways. The work of sound art therefore has no fixed form and only emerges according to the situation—subjectively and in interaction with visitors’ actions.

In the summer, the exhibition will be expanded to comprise a third component: Electrical Walks through the streets of Aachen. Kubisch has mapped out walking tours through the city like a spatial musical score and has developed induction headphones with which participants can immerse themselves in her electromagnetic sound investigations. Signals from ATMs, electric motors, neon signs, and Wi-Fi routers all form part of a constantly expanding parallel universe. In Electrical Walk, these all coalesce to form an acoustic portrait of Aachen.

Curated by Miriam Schmidt.

The exhibition is supported by the Peter und Irene Ludwig Stiftung and the Karin und Uwe Hollweg Stiftung.