Events/Openings

Galerie Mario Mazzoli is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in its space by Christina Kubisch.

At a lecture in San Francisco earlier this year, Christina Kubisch talked as much about seeing as hearing. This fact might be considered unusual, or paradoxical even, for an artist who has made a career predominantly out of creating and capturing sound. And yet, it is precisely through promoting an intense interplay between the eye and ear that Kubisch’s works afford an opportunity to “see” the world more clearly, to apprehend its subtleties in a more nuanced way.

What does Kubisch reveal and how does she allow us to understand our contemporary reality differently? How can sound be anything other than something “hidden from view”? While her early scores revel in the challenges of annotating sound created through more unusual means (such as thimbles scraping on glass), Kubisch’s recent works immerse audiences in existing soundscapes. Her custom-made headphones, for example, induct the wearer into a parallel world of electromagnetic sound. The throbbing, crackling, pulsating, rhythms of this dimension are the manmade tracks that we have overlaid onto nature’s compositions. They emanate from transit systems, buildings, lighting displays, security installations, and more, creating a giant sound symphony of sorts, and animating the seemingly lifeless lumps of concrete and metal that generate them.

In general, Kubisch promotes this heightened awareness of our surrounds through relatively modest means. Often working at sites which are disused and or burdened by their histories, she creates environments that account for multiple histories, and futures, in a spirit of true contemporaneity.