Inspired by... Reading Club with Isabel Bredenbröker and Adam Pultz at Queer Sonic Fingerprint

Inspired by… | Reading Club

With Guest Artists Isabel Bredenbröker and Adam Pultz in the Queer Sonic Fingerprint exhibition

Art Laboratory Berlin is delighted to invite you to take part in our ongoing discursive format – a reading club, curated by Tuçe Erel (next to our colloquium, curated by Regine Rapp).

Inspired by… is an event series, a hybrid format derived from reading group and artist talk formats. In each session, an invited artist will choose a specific text or excerpt from a book that was inspirational for the artist’s practice and/or a particular project that the artist will introduce.

The project follows up Tuçe Erel’s Posthumanism Reading Group, organized between 2018-2020. After co-reading and discussing plenty of seminal texts in two years, the club is transforming into a new discussion, presentation and reading program, an online and offline exchange platform in a non-hierarchical and non-institutional infrastructure in the fields of arts, science and technology.

Guest Artist on 5 November 2024

On 5 November 2024, Inspired by… will be an on-site session with Isabel Bredenbröker and Adam Pultz during their exhibition Queer Sonic Fingerprint. This edition of Inspired by is an ‘independent event’ at Berlin Science Week 2024 and will take place at Art Laboratory Berlin on-site. The artist-research duo brings a book chapter titled “The Stuff of Kinship” by Janet Carsten in conversation with their interactive multichannel sound installation Queer Sonic Fingerprint. The artistic-research work speculatively imagines non-normative relations around cultural belongings in ethnological museums and beyond. Kinship is one of the key terms in their research and Carsten’s text has been part of the research process for this project. After reading this text collectively, Isabel and Adam will talk about their work, and we will listen to a part of the sound installation.

About the Queer Sonic Fingerprint exhibition

How do bodies sound? And how can a group of cultural belongings in an ethnological museum collection resonate in unexpected queer kin relations? In their interactive multichannel sound installation Queer Sonic Fingerprint, sound artist Adam Pultz and anthropologist Isabel Bredenbröker speculatively imagines non-normative relations around cultural belongings in ethnological museums and beyond. The installation amplifies the collection‘s materiality through sonic fingerprints—that is—the reflections of a body’s unique acoustic characteristics. In a transdisciplinary encounter with sound processing and evolutionary computing, dynamically changing fingerprints bring selected parts of museum collections to life in a multichannel sonic ecology.

Queerness contains a tension, something which gender and sexuality studies scholar Susan Talburt identifies as a fundamentally productive quality. Cultural belongings in ethnographic collections are things deeply affected by the colonial encounter and its political aftermath. They, too, are caught in a tense state, as current debates about ownership, their history, their representative functions, and proper place come to show. Voices from indigenous communities and scholars have reframed so-called ethnographic “objects” in museum collections as person-like entities. The installation includes those relations that are currently being claimed with increasing insistence, alongside relations between collection items.

The playback of the sonic fingerprints will form part of a multichannel sound installation also involving field recordings and spoken narrative. Here, kinship and relations between objects become sonic relations, contributing a different register to what is traditionally a visual experience. Museum displays and collections are governed by strict rules: most things may not be touched and many things remain inaccessible in storage. In response to such restrictions, the sonic domain can provide access through a different sensory modality. Here, imagining a sonic image of these bodies offers a sensitive way of not looking or touching, not representing or claiming ownership.

Throughout the installation the sonic fingerprints will merge, recombine, and create new generations of virtual fingerprints with their own acoustic properties, evading museal categories and representational claims, just like queer identities and ways of kinning evade normative ideas of gender, relations, and sexuality. Through evolutionary computing and audience interaction, Queer Sonic Fingerprint highlights new object-relations that transcend the logic of the museum as a place of clear-cut display, education and safekeeping. A multisensory and interactive format challenges such established forms of museal practice. Through the speculative sonic-material futures that emerge, non-normative kinship and queer narratives work toward a critique of the ethnographic collection’s colonial roots.