Deutsches Historisches Museum - Verf�hrung Freiheit. Kunst in Europa seit 1945 - Blog

Dear all,

we hope all of you had lovely holidays with family and friends and an equally lovely New Year’s Eve.

Our past year was filled with excitement, new friendships, exhibitions ending and new ones opening, lots of work but also lots of fun and we hope it was the same for you.

What all happened? 

Raul Keller is a young Estonian artist whose works can currently be seen in Kumu’s exhibition ‘Out of Sync – Looking back at the History of Sound Art’ (until January 12, 2014). Right at the beginning of his talk he informs us that he does not actively consider himself a sound artist:

‘I work predominantly with sound but also with photography, the fine arts and text. I think John used a very nice term: ‘auditory culture’ – the contemporary field which embraces music and sound art approaches and somehow blends them with popular culture and different practices.’  

“Most people would probably say that architecture does not produce sound, it cannot be heard. But neither does it radiate light yet it can be seen. We see the light it reflects and thereby gain an impression of form and material. In the same way we hear the sounds it reflects and they, too, give us an impression of form and material”

(Steen Eiler Rasmussen – Experiencing Architecture (1959)

In the second part of our symposium, the American artist John Grzinich, based in Estonia, talked about the project ‘tuned city: architecture and sound’ in Tallinn. 

Last week – some of you might have seen that on Facebook – we had a symposium on sound and public space in Tallinn. Our speakers were journalists, artists, innovation designers and sound architects who presented a wide variety of their projects.

While we don’t want to bore you with long accounts of what was said, we would very much like to show you some of the work that was shown to us.  

‘How can you make art accessible and understandable for kids?’ was a question we asked Jane Meresmaa-Roos, one of Kumu’s museum educators. Her approach was to ask questions which the kids could not simply answer with ‘yes’ or ‘no’ thereby stimulating their imagination. Another one was to make the materials used in art more familiar by letting the kids experience them: Is stone cold and how warm is wood? What sound does glass make and how much does a bronze statue weigh? How hard is it to throw a leaf made of paper and how easy is it to mold clay?