Secession turns sound into sculpture in Bernhard Leitner exhibition

Bernhard Leitner’s exhibition “Soundspacesculpture” opens at Vienna’s Secession on Friday, presenting objects and installations designed to be experienced through hearing as much as sight, ORF reported.

The centrepiece is “Wasser Würfel / Wand Wellen”, a large work created specifically for the main hall. Water sounds are played through a 48-channel sound system attached to PVC tubes inside a wooden cube. The sounds change in rhythm and can also be perceived as waves.

Curated by Jeanette Pacher, the exhibition surveys Leitner’s theories and practice, from early drawings and notes to sound-space sculptures, objects and installations.

Among the works on display is a “sound lounger” and “Pulsierende Stille 2”, an installation made from two metal plates forming a narrow corridor. Speakers emit low frequencies that are barely or not at all audible from outside. Their bass-heavy vibrations create a pulsating space that visitors perceive as they walk through it.

In “Klang-Strahlen”, metal plates redirect sounds. Leitner has made a similar intervention in the room containing Gustav Klimt’s “Beethoven Frieze”.

The exhibition also includes photographic documentation of Leitner’s early spatial installations from the 1960s and 1970s, which he used in his research into acoustics, as well as experiments in what he calls “body hearing”. Leitner said that the skin also contains “acoustic cells” that contribute to a comprehensive listening experience.

“Hearing and seeing are intertwined,” Leitner said at a press preview on Thursday. The artist, born in Feldkirch in 1938, has spent five decades exploring the relationship between space and sound.

After studying architecture in Vienna, Leitner said he developed the “utopian idea of working plastically with sound”. “We are used to quickly perceiving sounds as music, but we are constantly moving through an acoustic environment. I do not work with music, but with acoustic material,” he said.

Leitner, who has spent several years in Paris, New York and Berlin and now lives in Vienna and Gaindorf, said he wanted to encourage spatial listening. “What I do is not music, but visual art,” he said.

“Bernhard Leitner. Soundspacesculpture” runs at the Vienna Secession from September 11 to November 22.