Under the title Thresholds, the German Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale 2024 narrates history and the future from various artistic positions. Thresholds stands for the present as a place where no one can stay and that only exists because one thing has occurred and another still awaits. For people with biographies characterized by migration, the temporal perception of the present as a threshold between the retrospective and the prospective is paired with a fundamental spatial and physical experience of living at the intersection of different belongings.

Artists of the German Pavillon and Island of Certosa: Yael Bartana, Ersan Mondtag, Michael Akstaller, Nicole L’Huillier, Robert Lippok, Jan St. Werner

For Volumes Inverted, Jan St. Werner developed a loudspeaker instrument for the monastic ruin on La Certosa. Its dialogue with another loudspeaker, which focuses a beam of sound from the lagoon over several hundred meters back to the island, gives rise to two interlocking sound installations: one activating the monastery’s interior, the other distributing sound across the island. This duality questions one’s own localization and prompts an interchange between the island and the surrounding lagoon. 

The 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia takes place in Venice from April 20 to November 24, 2024. The contribution for the German Pavilion is curated by Çağla Ilk, the commissioner is the ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen.

https://deutscher-pavillon.org/en

Fotos Deutscher Pavillon / Thomas Aurin

Video Joseph Kadow

The New Alphabet, Volume 21 

A publication series by HKW Berlin

Editors: Detlef Diederichsen, Arno Raffeiner, Jan St. Werner

Publisher: Spector Books

90 pages, German and English edition

Color illustrations, paperback with folded dust cover

ISBN DE: 978-3-95905-657-1

ISBN EN: 978-3-95905-658-8

Price: 10 €

People perceive audio events in very different ways. There is still a great deal of uncertainty about the physics, biology, signifiers and unconscious processes on the basis of which auditory experiences are constructed. The book applies the methods of artistic research to convey a sense of how mental space, social practice and the direct experience of sound relate to each other and how connections are generated between these levels – a topology of resonances, reflections and vibrations in perpetual motion.

With contributions by J.-P. Caron and Patricia Reed, Diana Deutsch and Marc Matter, Tim Johnson, Vera Molnar, Gascia Ouzounian, Matana Roberts and David Grubbs as well as Paolo Thorsen-Nagel

Table of contents:

Introduction – Detlef Diederichsen, Arno Raffeiner, Jan St. Werner

Listening to Unencoded Worlds – J.-P. Caron and Patricia Reed

“A strange woman had entered the room and begun to sing” – Diana Deutsch and Marc Matter in Conversation

This somewhere that is still moving – Tim Johnson

View from the Balcony – Matana Roberts and David Grubbs in Conversation

Becoming Air: On Sonic Spatial Metaphysics – Gascia Ouzounian

The Body as Sound, the Sound as Body – Paolo Thorsen-Nagel

With graphic works by Vera Molnar courtesy DAM Projects