Growing up within an accelerating experience economy and the instantaneity of on-demand consumption, “liveness” has become something weird to me. I found that recent shifts in our experience of togetherness further re-frame this notion. With my curatorial work, I began to trace back histories of liveness. And I also found them to be entangled with technologies. It seems urgent to think of technologies in an expanded sense, to not just consider digital technologies, but to include bodily technologies like the voice, or nature’s capacity to generate something we can best grasp as “technology”, like mushroom mycelia. 

From living fog sculptures to generative music compositions and machine learning videos, I seek to explore different ways of inhabiting life and identify various forms of enchantment and animation. Here I want to share some “behind the scene” pictures of how I have worked within the different spaces of Haus der Kunst, to create exhibitions as living environments, that can never be experienced from a safe distance but only through direct presence in the moment. To me, exhibitions are a responsive, time based medium; an immersive experience rather than a cognitive encounter. 

An important influence was the artist Isabel Lewis who speaks of her performances as occasions, creating situations that enable something or someone. And it was her who gave me a small book about gardens which literally changed my perspective on… perspective. The book is about landscapes, about the cultivation of nature, but it made me think more deeply about the body as our main interface to the world. An ever-changing world that is saturated with technology. “Live” can be real-time, as in: immediate; but it can also linger, it can be a trace or a hunch. It’s something very emotional and atmospheric. I wonder if it could be a relational technology? 

I am especially intrigued by works that blur the confines of space, that break the spell of solid or static architecture. Working with Fujiko Nakaya and her fog sculptures has definitely expanded my perception and ability to observe – skills that are instrumental in my curatorial work. The site specific sound installation for wich Carsten Nicolai installed an antenna on the roof of the museum has challenged me to find words for a work that can hardly be captured, recorded or represented: a garden of sounds triggered by cosmic radiation. I have had extensive conversation with Jenna Sutela about how aliveness is aided by machines and also WangShui brilliantly engaged architecture and perception: Using the window(screen) as mediator between inside and outside world, we suspended a video sculpture from the ceiling which, slightly tilted, really shifted the grounds. 

Together with colleagues I am also working on a serial project which we called a “live exhibition”. Not only because of the presence of performers, but also to highlight the presentness of the many elements that animate the space. This reminds me of a powerful and short intermezzo by Pan Daijing: Months after the exhibition was closed, friends kept sending me pictures of curious details, wondering if they had encountered traces of the exhibition. I understand this as a sign for the exhibition to be still “alive”. 







































Words: Sarah Johanna Theurer

Photos: Sarah Johanna Theurer