Opening: Friday, 22 May 2026, 7pm
With The Emergence of Sound, Ludwig Forum Aachen presents a wide-ranging survey of the sound artist and composer Christina Kubisch (b. 1948 in Bremen, lives and works in Berlin). For more than five decades, Kubisch has been traversing the boundaries of composition, installation, performance and even intermedia video environments. In her artistic research, sound and noise are not mere by-products of physical processes, nor are they a purely musical language. Rather, they are cultural and natural forces that she sets to work in her interrogations of wide-ranging constellations, cutting across aesthetic, spatial, technical, scientific, infrastructural and social domains.
From her early intermedia works and performances of the 1970s through the sound installations of the 1980s and 1990s to a site-specific soundscape from the early 2020s, The Emergence of Sound offers an in-depth view of the key strands of this sound-art pioneer’s work. Previously unseen scores, working sketches, documentary archive material and listening excerpts offer insights both into her working processes and into her musical and artistic milieu. Her 1970s practice is deeply entwined with the history of the Ludwig Forum, then newly founded to champion a programme that dissolved art’s disciplinary boundaries. Various connections are brought into focus through additional works drawn from the Ludwig Forum’s collection. A version of her Electrical Walks has been devised specifically for Aachen and will extend the exhibition out into public space. These events are set to take place during the exhibition run; further details will be provided in due course.
Curated by Miriam Schmidt.
The exhibition is made possible by the support of the Peter und Irene Ludwig Stiftung and the Karin und Uwe Hollweg Stiftung.
Photo: © Christina Kubisch