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The large exhibition room of the Marburg Kunstverein, enclosed on three sides, is the present home of the title piece, Breathing Space, 2015: 5,400 dome loudspeakers, 8 channel audio, cables.

If one enters the room during one of the silent breaks, one is faced with two frames of reference: from the neighbour-ing rooms, in the distance, come the sounds of the other, chronologically synchronized, works of Clara Oppel. Here though, in the main area, the first thing one notices is one’s own footsteps echoing in the resonant space. A gently curved object rises somewhat from the black stone floor. The mirror shine of 5,400 loudspeaker domes glimmers and thereby defines a peaceful and structured but nonetheless enigmatic course – like a numerical sign in the room.

What does art sound like? Well, mostly it doesn’t sound at all. Traditional painting and sculpture don’t have an audio track. Until recently, the temples of art were silent, often almost devoutly silent, except for banging doors and so on – sounds that didn’t come from the works of art. Such sounds were certainly not part of the creative conception of the artists being exhibited in the hallowed halls. That’s not to say that even traditional art, art created before the avant-garde pro-ductions of the 20th century abandoned all borders, couldn‘t or didn’t arouse the auditory imagination.

‘How can you enjoy a world which you can‘t see when you close your eyes?‘ (Fariduddin Attar)

Ladies and Gentlemen, close your eyes, and you’ll see – hear, rather – how a thousand birds take flight. They soar through the valleys of sufferings and passions: desire, love, knowledge, abstinence, unity, dismay, dissolution. Only thirty birds manage to get to the end of the world, where mountains surround them, there, where the wise bird king lives, a hoopoe called Simorgh. ‘Si morgh‘ – the name itself means ‘thirty birds‘. Now, having reached the destination, the birds realise that they have in fact been searching all along for themselves – and their quest has now been rewarded.

from Pindar: Eighth Pythian Ode Text: Sylvia WendrockTranslation: Keith David Harris You can vanish into thin air trying to understand this sentence. It comes from the Epikinae, a collection of odes by the fifth century B.C. Greek poet Pindar. He wrote choral poetry for the winners of the Olympic Games. This was intended as a…