Events | Annika Kahrs – Gravity's Tune
Berlin | September 11, 2023 – November 26, 2023
Annika Khars – Gravity's Tune
In her solo exhibition, artist Annika Kahrs (Villa Aurora Fellow 2023) presents a new video work interpreting – in collaboration with the composer Louis d’Heudières and musicians from Los Angeles – the acoustic signal that helped make gravitational waves audible for the first time. Dr. Keith Thorne, physicist at the US-based LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), serves as scientific consultant for Kahrs’ artistic-musical exploration of gravitational waves. In 2015, LIGO was the first to translate gravitational waves – waves in the tissue of space-time that are created, among other things, by colliding black holes and that “travel” at the speed of light – into acoustic signals.
Kahrs uses the acoustic recordings of astrophysics to raise fundamental questions about how they stimulate our imagination and provide insight into events that are difficult to imagine. Kahrs sensitizes the film’s viewers to the fact that it is precisely such “unusual” sounds that always also challenge our understanding of hearing, sound, and not least music. In the words of scientist Keith Thorne, LIGO could indeed be seen as the quietest concert hall on Earth, detecting an extraterrestrial sound that is filtered out of a wealth of terrestrial background noise with maximum precision.
In her films, installations, and performances, Annika Kahrs deals with sounds in the broadest sense of the word. She is interested in sounds with special properties, including sounds in the infrasonic range, but also in sounds that, thanks to their physical properties, express a phenomenon such as the gravitational waves described above. Kahrs approaches these acoustic phenomena via the medium of music: her work opens an entryway into inaudible and hardly imaginable (sound) worlds, while also referring to both the possibilities and limitations of the audible.
Exhibition information
Duration:
September 14 – November 26, 2023
Opening hours:
Thursday and Friday, 1-7p.m.
Saturday and Sunday, 11 a.m.-7 p.m.
Venue:
Exhibtion room of the Schering Stiftung
Unter den Linden 32-34
10117 Berlin
Exhibition events
Lecture by Prof. Alessandra Buonanno followed by a discussion between her, Annika Kahrs and Louis d'Heudières.
*The lecture and the discussion will be in English.*
Created in the tissue of space-time, gravitational waves are a propagating phenomenon caused by, amongst others, the collision of black holes traveling at the speed of light. The US-based LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) was the first scientific institution in 2015 to translate gravitational waves into an acoustic signal which took the form of a “chirp” sound.
In a scientific input lecture, Prof. Dr. Alessandra Buonanno, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, explains how, about 100 years after Albert Einstein postulated the existence of gravitational waves, it was possible to provide empirical proof of this phenomenon. She provides information on how gravitational waves are measured, what the laboratory must be like for this purpose, and how gravitational waves can be converted into acoustic signals. Afterwards, she discusses the film “Gravity’s Tune” with the artist Annika Kahrs and the composer and sound artist Louis d’Heudières. The discussion centers around their artistic approach of using the medium of music to open up access to the world of astrophysics and the exploration of the universe.
The event takes place in the frame of the Berlin Science Week x Holzmarkt 25.
Date:
November 07, 2023, 7:30–10 p.m.
Venue:
Salöön im Holzmarkt 25
Holzmarktstr. 25
10243 Berlin
Artist Talk with Annika Kahrs, Dr. Christina Landbrecht, and Katerina Gregos (Artistic director, EMST – National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens)
*The panel discussion will be in English.*
They will address, among other issues, Kahrs’s interest in astrophysical questions, her preoccupation with the possibilities and limitations of the audible, and her efforts to grasp the intangible through art.
Date:
November 24, 2023, 6–8 p.m.
Venue:
Exhibtion room of the Schering Stiftung
Unter den Linden 32-34
10117 Berlin
A Project by Schering Stiftung in cooperation with the following partners:
