It’s served. In the middle of the large dining room, which the “Guardian of Paradise” has an eye on from the smoking room, the objects are enthroned as if on a banquet table. It is furniture transformed into musical instruments: table drum, armchair guitar, lighted violin and other things. Sculptures that not only want to be looked at, but also wait to be activated during performances. In this “Music Room” tubes want to be touched, strings struck and skins hit. Because even if this is an exhibition: the installations, videos, performances and sculptures form an artistic instrument that the internationally renowned artist Nevin Aladağ uses to conquer the space in Villa Stuck in many ways or – as director Michael Buhrs does in Foreword to the accompanying catalog it puts it – makes the place vibrate.
The presentation is called “Sound Of Spaces”. And these sounds are just as complex as the rooms are numerous. The exhibition runs through the entire building like a gigantic score. In the sometimes very subdued light of the historical rooms and in the midst of the wonderful furnishings, the objects in the music salon, for example, appear as if they belong here. Many of the tables, chairs, armchairs, chests of drawers and lights that Aladağ transforms into resonance bodies with the help of professional instrument makers are commonplace in themselves, so that they are reminiscent of ready-mades in the context of the exhibition. Some are special because of their aesthetics. Selected because of their shape, their design, their materiality, they could just as easily come from the bulky waste as from the antique shop. The artist usually finds them at flea markets.
Nevin Aladağ grew up in Stuttgart, studied in Munich and lives in Berlin.
(Photo: Trevor Good)
Nevin Aladağ has been tracing this type of sound experience as a means of the visual arts since the 1990s. The artist, born in 1972, studied sculpture with Olaf Metzel at the Munich Academy and lives in Berlin. She has received numerous awards, was a participant in Documenta 14 in 2017 with one of her “music rooms” and in the same year took part in the Venice Biennale with the performance “Raise The Roof”. Since 2019 she has been professor for interdisciplinary artistic work at the Dresden University of Fine Arts.
The sculptural works in the exhibition include graphic works, which are often inspired by Arabic patterns and ornaments. As if under a magnifying glass, she zooms out structures and puts them together in small pieces. This is how screens and lights, picture surfaces and tondi are created. Or she uses the macrame technique to make wall hangings and room dividers that repeat such patterns. Or put together tapestries from different sources in which aesthetic, religious and political statements collide.
But the focus of Aladağ’s work is on the “soundspaces”. She doesn’t just convert individual pieces of furniture. Sometimes she also installs instrumental structures in the corners of a room and thus conquers the architecture. In other sound sculptures, also called “resonators”, she unites entire groups of instruments or different orchestral groups. Several of these sometimes huge structures can be seen in the large domed hall of Stuck’s new studio and, in their sculptural appearance, are vaguely reminiscent of Oskar Schlemmer’s “Triadic Ballet”. During various performances and activations, the objects in the “Music Rooms” or “Resonators” are made to sound by musicians from the New Collective Munich NKM.
A tambourine on a long journey: Nevin Aladağ’s three-channel video “Session” in the exhibition “Sound Of Spaces” in the Villa Stuck in Munich.
(Photo: Nevin Aladag / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021; Courtesy the artist and Wentrup, Berlin)
The sonic conquest of space goes even further with Aladağ. The monumental three-channel installations “Session” and “Traces” can be seen on the ground floor of the New Atelier. One was created in 2013 on behalf of the United Arab Emirates, with the other, the artist, who grew up in Stuttgart, created a monument to the city of her childhood in 2015. Drums and tambourines roll over paths and sand dunes or are pulled through the water. A violin, which is attached to a playground carousel, strokes itself with every turn on a bow, which is fixed at the edge like a viewer. A tambourine carries the sound of the street it is driven through while cymbals scrape over cobblestones. Flutes and horns feed their sound from the air of a balloon. Other instruments, including an accordion, are made to sound by playground equipment set in motion. It is a precisely orchestrated cacophony in which the city and nature are the orchestral musicians.
Hands and feet are also used as acoustic transmission sensors. At the performance “Raise The Roof”. So the viewer only hears the clacking of the stilettos of the dancers on copper plates, because the music is only in the dancers’ headphones. The title and duration of each piece of music are printed on their t-shirts. Aladağ first realized the invitation to dance “Raise The Roof” in Berlin in 2007 by having the dancers tap on a roof directly on the former border between the east and west of the city. One result were the copper plates, which the artist used in various installations, pushed by the heels. In the Villa Stuck they hang as picture objects on the walls, next to them a hammer that is in a – what else? – Stiletto opens.
Dancing stilettos: from the performance “Raise The Roof” by Nevin Aladağ (2017, Film Still).
(Photo: Nevin Aladag / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021; Courtesy the artist and Wentrup, Berlin)
At this point, at the latest, it will become clear to every viewer that the artist, with all the seriousness with which she pursues her concept, also charges the subject with a lot of humor. Then a flourish – which Nevin Aladağ staged in the Villa Stuck in the form of two wall-filling notations with half cannonballs on score lines. Ta-Ta-Ta-Taaaaaa!
Nevin Aladağ: “Sound of Spaces”, Museum Villa Stuck, Prinzregentenstr. 60, until Feb. 20, 2022, information about the activations and the accompanying program at www.villastuck.de