Audiosfera - Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
Audiosfera - Sound Experimentation 1980-2020, curated by Francisco Lopez, is opening today in the magnificent Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. My sound collage Tehrsfahan is part of it, what an honour. I had the chance to go to this museum two years ago, after playing a Musica Dispersa Concert in Madrid. I spent hours in the building but only saw a part of their exhibits. I was blown away and almost moved to tars by Picasso’s Guernica (Even though we had a reproduction in my high school that I passed every day. Already then did I wonder why there is a light bulb in it. I still don’t have the answer.) Many people did stand there crying. (I wonder who buys the mugs in the gift shop after. How can you drink out of something that shows a mother holding a dead child?) This larger than life work related the horrors of war so well that the only thing that could somehow save my day after were the cubist paintings in the next wing, most of which had guitars in them. Especially Juan Gris’ “The Open Window” stayed on my mind. I’d like to have a work place like that. So the fact that my small piece gets to share a building with these masters (and other colleagues in sound that I value) is making my day, or week, or month. Here some detailed info about the exhibit: By way of a selection of hundreds of sound works, Audiosphere. Sound Experimentation 1980-2020 looks to cover an historical and cultural void in terms of the recognition, exhibition and analysis of a key part of the recent changes that have taken place in the artistic conception of sound creation.
Conceived from a social perspective, and with the aim of revealing and providing context to reflect upon and discuss the techno-cultural changes that have occurred since the 1980s, the exhibition will present the work of a broad number of experimental sound artists, hailing from all over the world, the majority unknown to the contemporary art spectator.
The show will revolve around seven sections, each one addressing different social, technological, historical and cultural processes: genealogies, networks, mega accessibility, cyborgisation, aesthetogenesis, recombination and rights. Although such processes have been generated collectively and today are widespread, they have not been sufficiently identified, acknowledged or analysed artistically.
Audiosphere thus seeks to constitute a non-conceptual, large-scale contemporary art exhibition with no images or objects, underpinned solely by sound works and an exhibition design that facilitates experiential, profound and prolonged listening.