Venue: KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Main Hall

11 am–11 am, continuously (24 hours)

Free admission

Lydia Ourahmane (b. 1992, DZ) presents the site-specific piece sync in collaboration with musician Daniel Blumberg (b. 1990, GB) as part of KW Institute for Contemporary Art’s Pause series.

Lydia Ourahmane, sync, 2022. Courtesy the artist and Daniel Blumberg

This new commission is a continuation of the artist’s engagement with the emotional, psychological, and political correlations between material, body, and place. Comprising sculpture, installation, and sound, Ourahmane’s artistic practice weaves together the complex tapestry of the personal, the collective, and the metaphysical. In her works, she addresses how narratives can be shaped, altered, and connected through the migration of objects, beliefs, and histories.

KW’s invitation challenges Ourahmane’s preceding material approach. Whereas she previously worked with tangible, temporal forms, the artist uses the commission to reflect on permanence as the transcendence of matter. Through the prism of shared behaviors and social relationships between individuals, Ourahmane questions how continuity is reflected through repetition, language, and myth. Meanwhile, she is interested in how our awareness of that continuity is defined by its exhaustion—and how this becomes a way of reflecting and challenging the continuum of personal and broader histories.

sync is a single time-intensive event which discusses the heartbeat as the only assurance of permanence we will ever embody. Regarded as chaotic systems in cardiovascular science, hearts have been known to fall subject to the phenomenon termed “synchronization of chaos”: a simultaneity of cardiac rhythms that may occur when two or more chaotic systems are joined in specific yet erratic emotional environments.

Lydia Ourahmane and Daniel Blumberg © Aidan Zamiri

In the main hall of KW, which will remain open for twenty-four consecutive hours for the first time in the institution’s history, sync will premiere as a live sonic performance in which twenty-four participants at a time are invited to have their heartbeats amplified into the space. A simple arrangement of seats forms a physical echo chamber, creating a matrix in which each participant can explore visceral conditions of assimilation through physical proximity.

As sync is an in-progress composition, we kindly ask each participant to observe and respect the instructions for taking part. When entering, visitors should remember this is a silent event as a live recording will be in progress.

Each participant can decide when to enter or exit the hall and will be guided accordingly by our team of invigilators. Visitors who enter only as listeners are invited to experience the work from the designated spaces on the ground floor above the main hall.

The Pause series at KW Institute for Contemporary Art allows for an ephemeral yet in-depth engagement with a single artwork, with the aim of drawing out and questioning relationships between the past, present, and future. The Pause installations act as individual punctuations of KW’s regular program, with each artwork presented for a short period between exhibition cycles, all working within this state of in-betweenness. Pause projects are predominantly commissioned or reworked pieces that shift between (or even merge) the disciplines of performance, installation, video, and sonic work.

Team 

Artists: Lydia Ourahmane, Daniel Blumberg

Curator: Sofie Krogh Christensen

Curatorial Assistant: Nikolas Brummer

Sound Technicians: James Dunn, Paolo Combes, Enrika Myskovskaja

Head of Production: Claire Spilker

Technical Management: Wilken Schade

Press and Marketing: Anna Falck-Ytter, Marie Kube

Text: Sofie Krogh Christensen, Lydia Ourahmane

Proofreading and Translation: Sylee Gore, Lutz Breitinger

Trainee: Lara Scherrieble

Interns: Fangrong Tian, Janika Jänisch, Luisa Schmoock

With thanks to Schertler Audio.