Counterpoint

7 november 2015 – 3 january 2016

Sometimes a concept is hard to grasp. For example, take the words “sound art.” Yet, from the mid-1990s onwards it acted as a collective label for various exciting and artistic expressions in between the different genres. In the rupture between installation art, performance, techno music, free improvisation, sound design, architecture, collective political action, essay film and various archival principles, new forms of collaboration emerged in which sounds and ideas could move freely unimpeded.

At the same time there was, especially within the world of contemporary art, a growing need to give the whole phenomenon a name. To categorize and position the various participants and artists in functional columns and meaningful strata to delineate art history and contemporary aesthetics. A growing need arose for technical expertise in the museum and gallery world, so the works incorporating sound in various forms could be accommodated. It is not easy to separate one from the other, and the term sound art has become increasingly problematic as time goes on. It has seemed to be more of a transition between different forms of expression than a specific genre.

What fired the imagination in one of the first international presentations – the Sonic Boom exhibition at Hayward Gallery in London in the spring of 2000, curated by David Troop, was the combination of variations in expression and all of the threads running back to inspirational figures such as John Cage, Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys and Pauline Oliveros, and even further back to the various experiments with form by Futurism and Dadaism.

More information can be found in the Folder (available only in Swedish).

 Participating artists

Robert Henke / Tarik Barri

Billy Klüver / Andy Warhol

Carolina Falkholt

Åke Hodell

Öyvind Fahlström

Dan Fröberg / Alexandra E. Lindh

Peter Johansson