SCATTER, NO TURN

8-Channel-Sound/3-Channel Video/Objects/Light/Drawings

 

First shown at GAK Bremen, 2024

 

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 visual 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. 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.