Kunsthalle unterwegs: FOLDS (in tape fields)
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Photo: KMRU
FOLDS (in tape fields) is a cooperation between Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and IMAI – Inter Media Art Institute, realised as part of IMAI’s biennial exhibition project Circulation Copies on screens and loudspeaker systems throughout Düsseldorf’s urban space.
KMRU explores how urban infrastructures condition and shape listening in public space. Working with listening walks, detours and incidental recordings, he approaches Düsseldorf as an auditory field in which routines, rhythms and expectations overlap and intersect.
FOLDS (in tape fields) unfolds across multiple sites and loudspeaker systems throughout the city. Sound-based motifs, loops and field recordings can be heard at staggered intervals and recur without forming a closed whole. Time is stretched, interrupted or folded back on itself. Meaning emerges in passing by, in lingering, or equally through what goes overheard. Rather than offering a fixed cartography, the work opens out to expansive, layered modes of perception.
“IN THE BEGINNING there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.” Ben Okri, The Famished Road, 1991
Berlin-based sound artist KMRU (Joseph Kamaru, * 1997 in Nairobi, Kenya) works with field recordings, ambient sound, and experimental techniques to explore listening cultures beyond dominant perceptual norms. He produces compositions, installations and performances internationally and has released multiple albums, including with his own label, OFNOT.
Circulating Copies is a biennial exhibition project of the IMAI – Inter Media Art Institute taking place on screens and sound systems across the city of Düsseldorf. Audiovisual media interfaces are a ubiquitous part of everyday life here, but they are rarely perceived as structures that can be played with or changed. This second edition of the project is dedicated to how these infrastructures organise, negotiate and reflect how we see and hear in public space.
Public audiovisual infrastructures—screens, LED walls, public address systems and sound systems—are not neutral containers of information or entertainment. They carry assumptions about how the majority of people see and hear, and how our attention “functions”. These assumptions produce exclusions: they privilege specific bodies, senses and modes of experience, while rendering others invisible or inaudible. Circulating Copies takes this as its starting point to ask how artistic interventions can make such conditions visible, audible and changeable. Seeing and hearing are here understood
not as universal abilities, but rather as different, situated, and relational experiences that emerge within specific technical and social environments.
Alongside the works in public space, Circulating Copies includes an accompanying programme developed in close exchange with artists, theorists, translators and activists oriented towards non-visual and non-oral modes of communication, deliberately challenging normative modes of accessing audiovisual art.
In cooperation with
