Annika Kahrs is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist exploring the intersection between visual art and music. Her upcoming exhibition OFF SCORE at the Hamburger Bahnhof is her largest to date. In her work, Kahrs brings together video art, sound installation and live performance to explore themes of place, space, play and liminality. The impressive breadth of this exhibition spans over more than 10 video works and features daily in-house performances of the first performance piece Kahrs ever created back in 2012. There will also be additional performances around the city through the duration of the exhibition. Her intimate yet boundary-bending works feature a wide range of protagonists, from local orchestras marching through their Italian village to a security guard making music in a Berlin mall. This dynamic exhibition brings together the experience, work and sound of performers, composers and community alike, leaving the viewer with an experience that can’t help but resonate.
This exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof is the most extensive you’ve produced so far. What sets it apart from past shows?
The main difference is that I’ve never had an exhibition show an overview of my work to such an extent. It’s basically the past 15 years of my work in addition to performances that are rarely performed, especially on such a regular basis. I think it’s really special for me to see all of the works in one exhibition.
What was it like installing your work in such a huge space?
I was very lucky to work with an architectural bureau, Klaud, that basically did all of the design, including the walls, as well as the conceptual idea for the space itself. That was also an experience that I had for the first time, and it was great to see that they really understood the work and thought about certain elements that could be brought into the space. For example, you can see benches and seating areas in the installation that also play a role in the films being screened. The free-standing walls in the exhibition actually create a space or a place, but at the same time, keep it open enough to let the work breathe. Since I work mostly with video, and even more often with sound, it’s usually really hard to show multiple video works in one open space because, of course, the sound spills over.
How were you able to overcome that challenge?
We found a really good solution that uses a very special system. When you enter the space, you get a set of wireless headphones, and as you move through the exhibit, the sound changes with your movement. There are some ambient sounds around the works, too. For example, if you’re seeing the piece I made in this Italian village, you hear birds and a little fountain from the village. When you enter the main space where the video is, you have the actual sound from the work. If you move on, it slowly fades to the next work. It’s not just headphones – the system really supports the spatial idea of the sound, without destroying the other sound of the works. Having a whole team work on the exhibition at such a large scale made me feel really calm and secure. I’ve had big shows before, but not to this extent.
Space clearly plays a huge role in your work, but that goes beyond the installation. A lot of your pieces are also really spatially orientated. How did your work evolve to place sound in such specific physical places?
Space always played a role, but in the past years, it became more and more important. My work often incorporates the acoustic history of the place, whether it’s an Italian village, a desacralised church or even shopping malls in Berlin. I really think about the acoustic traits in certain spaces, which is important to me, because it’s connected to people in specific places and moments in history. In my early works, I always thought that they were about music, but I think they’re more about people making music or noise, or people listening to music, noise or sound and when, why and how they do that. And of course, it’s always also connected to the space itself, the history of the place and its potential future. Most of the places I’m interested in are very much on a threshold – the liminal places, places that used to be something and are now transitioning into something else, places where you don’t really know where the future will lead. I really like to situate my work there, because there’s always so much potential. There are so many questions for me to discover. And generally, I really like to collaborate with people.
My works are somewhere in between film, performance and music – they’re always shifting and leaning between one another.
You also tend to work with many of the same people over time. What role do collaborators have in your work?
[Due to] the nature of my work, I never really work alone. Of course, I come up with certain ideas, but, for example, Louis d’Heudières is a composer who I’ve worked with for over 10 years. The way we think is very similar, so if I come up with a concept or an idea, most of the time, he develops the music, score or the arrangement, and then we work off of that. My works are somewhere in between film, performance and music – they’re always shifting and leaning between one another. The works aren’t really classic short films, but they’re also not concerts, and they’re also somehow not just performances. I really like that, because shifting from one thing to another also gives me the liberty to work in certain ways.
And what about the performers?
I also have some performers who I’ve worked with for a couple of years, but I mostly go to different places, look at who’s there and hope that they want to collaborate with me, just like I did with the orchestra from the Italian village. From there, the performers also play an important role in the way I develop the piece. Even though the concept is always very clear in the beginning, and there’s a lot of research that goes into it, at a certain point, it’s also very influenced by all the people who are involved. In my new work with A Cashier’s Opera, there’s suddenly a service worker becoming a conductor for a string quintet, then there’s a teenage zombie choir singing a pop song, or security guards suddenly enter a weird place that could be a club, but isn’t really a club, rather some sort of DJ performance in an unexpected place. I really like that playful encounter with people who don’t necessarily make music, or with people who make music but create performances that are quite unusual for them.
What role does the audience play?
I’m curious to see how the visitors will perceive all of the works coming together in this exhibition and if they’ll be able to see the development of the different pieces, as well as the playfulness in them and the joy of the people involved in making music. In the work, you have so many different people coming together, so many groups for so many different reasons. I’m also curious to see how the audience reacts to the performance. It sounds so dry when I just explain the work, but in the end, it’s very intense. In English, that’s the wrong word, but in German, we would say intensiv. It’s intimate – very touching, even.
Another really interesting facet of your work is how sound also becomes a material. What does that look like in your practice?
I mean, I’m not a musician. I still come from the visual arts side, so I’m always looking for material I can work with. I really like using music, not just as part of a piece, but seeing it as a material that you can shape and form. I don’t really think about music and sound in a traditional way – I think about how it can shape the performance or the space. I think about it in a very visual way.
I don’t really think about music and sound in a traditional way – I think about how it can shape the performance or the space.
Another theoretical side of your work deals with how sound is material, but it also goes beyond the immediately perceivable, right?
Definitely, and there’s always information contained in sound that you can extract and rework in order to make it visible or audible in a new way. This is kind of crucial, especially for works that intersect more with the scientific world like Gravity’s Tune or Infra Voice, which both deal with sounds that are inaudible to human perception, but that, through certain tools or actions, you can basically pull into the human world or human perception. That’s also something that I’m really fascinated by – that we’re able to understand that through science, through visual art, through a kind of translation. The idea of translation also plays quite an important role in my work: translating things between the worlds of science, music and, of course, art in order to understand them.
There’s also a live performance, For Two To Play On One, as part of this exhibition. How does that come together with the other works?
There are multiple performances over the course of the exhibition; next year, there will be a performance series running until the end of summer, but this one will be performed every day throughout the whole running time of the show, in house, which I think is very unique. I haven’t seen this work since 2012. It’s the first performance I ever did, my first live performance. It has a very simple structure, or concept. You have a room with two pianists inside, and they just play classical music pieces written for two hands. You can enter the space; there’s some sort of anteroom, and then there’s the main room, but you’re only allowed to go into the main room alone. Once you enter the space with the piano, the musicians just immediately stop playing, and then they only start playing when you leave the room. It sounds super simple, but everything that happens in between is highly complex. It’s very playful, but it’s also very intimate. It’s hard to explain, because this work really needs to be experienced. It highlights basically everything that comes with playing music or creating music, because that’s such a highly communicative, social experience.
What’s your favourite piece that you’ve created so far?
That’s a really difficult question because they’re all so different. I think it’s always the work I’m currently working on. For all of the video work that we’ve done, and even the performances, we have weeks, even months of preparation, and then we usually film everything in one day. I like the moment when it all comes together – when everything you had in your mind and on paper for such a long time and you don’t know if it’s interesting or if it will work, suddenly happens.
OFF SCORE, Nov 14-May 3, Hamburger Bahnhof
