Conference of Echoes

Galerie Mazzoli presents new and recent works by Martyna Poznańska, Chelsea Leventhal, and Rubén D’Hers, three Berlin-based artists working at the intersection of sound and visual art. In collages, drawings, paintings, electroacoustic sound and kinetic installations, they allow themselves to be guided by their own hypersensitivity to environmental sounds and room acoustics. The visual is led by the auditory as they probe carefully into spaces of memory and loss, whether remembered, imagined, or feared.

In the front room of the gallery, Martyna Poznańska’s kinetic sound installation Simulacrum presents us with a landscape of metal and oil. Driven by infrasonic frequencies, carbon fiber rods quiver and collide in a multichannel array. For years, the artist has documented the forested regions of Eastern Poland through her artistic practice; in this context, these structures become phantom trees—future ghosts—as a response to a logging industry run amok. Through the composition, the sound of wind in the trees becomes the subject of an eschatological query, reconstructed as a cold rattling. While the volatile, wobbly mechanism of the kinetic sculpture Time’s Out emphasizes a sense of inevitability, Poznanska’s drawings seek to map a subliminal connection to natural forms and forces. Here, one could also imagine that the sound echoing in the space has descended directly onto paper.
In his recent works, Rubén D’Hers has examined the auditory experienceof interior spaces as a catalyst for memory and hallucination. In Terminaciones Nerviosas, presented in the middle room of the gallery, room acoustics are the subject of a diptych of paintings devoted to an intimate moment of sounding and listening within a tiled interior. The difficulty of holding onto the soft contours of such spaces is reflected as physical tension in two accompanying sculptures and in the evanescent quality of an audio recording sent through the room. In his still life paintings, D’Hers depicts the unassuming sources of the ambient sounds that shape the spaces we inhabit, often choosing to mirror his own interventions as well. Recording and painting alike become acts of tenderness towards rooms and objects that are intimately fused with the human experience, but all too easily ignored or forgotten.
In the gallery’s back room, two cyclones of fragmented walls, beams, doors, stairs, and windows circle in darkness. Chelsea Leventhal has made the sonic construction of home a focus in her work, and the kinetic sound installation The point of forgetting looks particularly at its fragility. In this study of thresholds, liminality, and destruction, the act of dwelling is expressed in shadows and echoes, as acoustic grains and sculptural pieces that waver between familiar and alienating. What could perhaps be read as an allegory for the complex relationship between domestic space and memory now seems inseparable from the inundation of imagery wrought by current events. Her collages, which combine images printed on wallpaper and trapped behind neat cut-outs, similarly explore the house archetype as an inevitable container for the horrific and the sublime.
Each drawing from a background in electroacoustic composition, sound studies, and visual art, D’hers, Poznańska, and Leventhal express their preoccupation with the role of sound in experiences of emplacement and their wish to preserve that which is in danger of disappearing or being destroyed. In these meditations on sound, silence, longing, and fear, through the act of kinetic and sonic reanimation but also on canvas and paper, it is ultimately a protective instinct that is expressed, as well as a determination to counter the ease of forgetting.

Images: © Eva Vialkowska | OKNO studio photography; © Martyna Poznańska