In her first institutional solo exhibition, artist and musician Nika Son explores insomnia and the tension between exhaustion, restlessness and desire. In rooms that are completely darkened, apart from isolated light and image elements, she examines multisensory perception and forms of manipulation that evoke states of heightened sensitivity in the face of excessive stimuli.
Our crisis-ridden present consists of constant stimulation, information, and the need to consume and process them. In her audiovisual composition Scatter, no turn, Nika Son intertwines this imperative of perpetual wakefulness with the urgent desire for sleep and the question of how our senses are altered in these states. When do we hear and when do we listen? How do we perceive time and when do we get lost in it?
Nika Son works between concrete music and concrete poetry with the sounds and images she records and observes in spaces of interpersonal communication. Whether a slide projector functions as a metronome, spatial perception expands into an intimate, sensual experience, or words and text fragments are processed into translations of translations of translations, the focus is always on influences from the environment and the echoes that their perception generates in the visitors and listeners.
In her works, which are situated at the interface between visual art and music, Nika Son reworks and interlaces tones and industrial sounds as well as images, voices, languages and ways of speaking. They are usually based on field recordings, which she modifies and fragments and then interweaves with artificial, analog and electronically generated sounds.
With Scatter, no turn—consisting of a nine-channel audio and video installation, drawings and objects—Nika Son creates an audiovisual space that is constantly changing, meandering and transforming.
There will be a fifty-minute live performance at the opening. The resulting sound and image composition will initiate an echo, an interplay between proximity and distance. The participants in the opening performance are Nika Son herself, the voice artist and dancer Michael Breithaupt, and the cellist Magdalena Ceple. After the performance, individual fragments of the recorded live sounds and noises will be incorporated into the installation as sonic traces. Further echoes will be created in the space, constantly forming new sound collages through loops at staggered intervals.
During the exhibition period, Nika Son invites other artists to make interventions in the form of music and lecture performances in order to create new constellations within the installation using their own language, to respond to the existing exhibition with sound and images, and to potentially modify and expand it. The selection of invited artists reflects the central idea of exchange and the simultaneous search for traces in Son’s own practice.
Nika Son’s sound-image composition Scatter, no turn investigates how certain things are brought into focus while others merely flicker by. What needs to be brought out of the darkness and into the light in other ways—both literally and figuratively? How can our senses, especially our sense of hearing, be enhanced and made more sensitive as interfaces? The exhibition directs our perception to the relationship between inside and outside, self and other, and interrogates the relationship between our sense of hearing and (social) orientation.
Nika Breithaupt alias Nika Son (*1981, lives in Hamburg) studied Fine Arts at HfK Bremen and HFBK Hamburg and works as an artist, musician, film composer, curator and DJ. She was Artist-in-Residence a.o. at Q-02 Brussels, Goethe-Institut Madrid (together with Helena Wittmann) and Mousonturm Frankfurt. Her performances, concerts and sound installations were presented at festivals such as Intonal Malmö, Meakusma, Klub Katarakt, Rotterdam Filmfestival, Nuits sonores, at HAU Berlin, Radiophrenia Glasgow, at the Kunstverein in Hamburg and Museum Folkwang. 2020 her album To Eeyore (on the label Entr’acte) came out, her new one and the sounddesign of Helena Wittmann’s film DRIFT will be released in April this year. Alongside her own artistic and musical work she regularly hosts art and music events at Golden Pudel Club in Hamburg and is co-curator of Papiripar Festival Hamburg (with Felix Kubin and Florian Bräunlich).
Events
Fr, 10.5.2024, 19:00 h
Opening
19:15 h Live-Performance with Nika Son & Michael Breithaupt, Magdalena Ceple
Sa, 25.5.2024, 18:30, 20:30 and 22:30 h
Nika Son & Lätitia Norkeit: Zwischen Schritte (Intermissions). Performance in three acts
on the occasion of the Long Night of Museums Bremen 2024
Thu, 6.6.2024, 20:00 h
PHEW (live/JP)
Thu, 11.07.2024 20:00 h
Mark Vernon (live/UK)
Funding
Karin and Uwe Hollweg Stiftung
Waldemar Koch Stiftung
Harry and Brigitte Bornemann Stiftung
Der Senator für Kultur der Freien Hansestadt Bremen