Project 013
SOUND BIESENTHAL
August 1 - 30, 2026
c/o Wehrmuehle Museum | Biesenthal (Germany)
Art Biesenthal 2026 — curated by Domenico Positano
Sound does not simply represent the world; it generates one.
Sound Biesenthal begins with sound as a condition. A force that both guides and is constructed by our perception, operating through invisible, intangible, and ephemeral relations. A challenge in the form of an artwork that resists notions of objecthood.
Across disciplines and media, the exhibition gathers artists whose practices approach the mechanism of sound through different states: resonance and silence, anticipation and witholding, abstraction and translation. Sound is more than a medium, but acts as a bridge between objects, bodies, images, and terrains.
It opens with Schmid’s loop of shushing– a command to silence that heightens spatial awareness. Vibrations circulate throughout the rooms with varying degrees of visibility, shifting between presence and implication. Ginsburg’s bamboo Hanging Drawings suggest a clanking that never comes. In Nauman’s Lip Sync murmurs swell into clamor before falling in and out of synchronization. Displaced rattles emerge mysteriously, bounce in the air of the room, ripple, or echo, destabilizing the relationship between a pulse and its source.
Displayed outdoors for the first time, Henning’s fountain is embedded within the lush architecture of Wehrmuehle, allowing its rhythms to enter into dialogue with the landscape. Likewise, Medalla’s Sand Machine, and Timischl’s New Order Monochrome–while situated indoors–become difficult to separate from the river trickling beyond the threshold. Mechanical and environmental acoustics begin to overlap.
The sporadic plucks of Tsabar’s Felt work, audible only with activation, pose harmony not as a fixed state but one that is continuously negotiated and reshaped through human intervention.
Tillmans’ photography traces the energy of Berghain as a sanctuary where music becomes a catalyst for movement and collective embodiment. Horn’s Der Eintänzer turns this same logic inward, distilling cadence into intimate gestures and transforming the ordinary into a register of attention that is unexpectedly poetic.
Works like Oehlen’s painting and A.R Penck’s Ilei are informed by rich musical practices. The former carries structures of rhythm into painterly patterns. In the latter, sound remains latent within the material presence of the work, implying an acoustic potential without necessarily fulfilling it. The act of creation itself involves a cross-sensory integration.
The exhibition unfolds as a field of converging reverberations and encounters, mirroring the rupture between expectation and experience. The ear accumulates sonic residue from each work, from the architecture itself, and from the body’s own functions, forming a constantly shifting composition.
Some works unfurl through the stillness of sustained listening; others entice the body to move and touch. They may sooth or, provocatively, conjure unease. Together, they weave a landscape in which listening is a mode of being, silence assumes its own form of vocality, absence becomes material.
The accompanying live programme extends these questions beyond the artwork and into the event. Listening spreads to the collective. The exhibition generates new relations that exceed spectatorship.
Text by Ronnie Bitov
Supported by BOSS
Visuals by Tim Schmid