Sounds (Opening)

Before division and specialization in the single disciplines began setting in from around the 1930s on, the historical avant-garde era in the fine arts constituted a mutually fertile synthesis. The radio was where this interplay between the arts would also repeatedly put into question the predominance of dialog-centered radio plays.

The exhibition project Sounds. Radio – Art – New Music makes radio accessible as an artistic medium. Beginning with the characteristic polyphony of radio as a medium art and the fascination with the immateriality that marked the early years of radio broadcasting, the exhibition opens up surprising perspectives in radio art and its potential to create unexpected perspectives.

The exhibition begins with five works of radio, created as part of the German-Czech radio project "rádio d-cz". By means of separating fences and connecting sounds, the radio features, radio plays and sound collages of adventurers and self-made men narrate fictive and actual contemporary history. An additional 25 reference pieces drawn from 80 years of radio history represent radio’s five elementary force fields: the flexible mobility with which radio overrides geographic distance, its picture-puzzle play with the boundaries between public and private space, the artistry with which it creates fictive spaces with original sounds, its ability to sensitize listeners to the complex textures of noises in everyday sound fields, and the uniquely original paradox in exposing the physical voice in an “immaterial” medium.

These five force fields may be experienced in excerpts from radio plays, features and sound compositions. A further 100 radio-art productions produced by participating broadcasting companies, as well as additional material may be heard in the exhibition's archive section. During the show (10 –14 Nov., 2010) Ursula Block will also be opening her archive on the history of New Music and Acoustic Art, and be moving into ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition spaces with parts of her Berlin shop "gelbe MUSIK". Within the exhibition Sounds she will create the special show "Conceivable Scores".