Salzburger Kunstverein

The summer exhibition echo* interlaces the artistic practices of Martin Beck and Sung Tieu. The exhibition creates an environment where the resonance of sound meets the solidity of institutional infrastructure, delving into temporal and spatial contexts at the same time.

Central to the exhibition is a collaborative sound installation by Beck and Tieu in the corridor enveloping the Kunstverein’s main exhibition space. The installation features an intricate network of 28 speakers arranged to produce a continuous sonic environment. The soundscape, alternately programmed by both artists, ranges from the chirping of crickets and howling bursts of winds to the tumult of a thunderstorm, each adding its narrative and emotional depth into the space. This resulting experience is as fluid and shifting as the historical and political contexts Beck and Tieu draw from in their individual works presented in the main exhibition hall.

Sung Tieu, known for her minimalism-critical approach, explores the tensions arising from design and its social application. Her installations compel us to consider the unseen layers of political narratives woven into everyday spaces. Tieu contributes two digital clocks, each set to different time zones linked to incidences of Havana syndrome around the globe. As a new commission, she produces a text-based work as part of her series Newspapers 1969–ongoing that interlaces personal biography and the kunstverein’s institutional mechanics. The newspaper serves as a sculptural and textual element blurring the lines between the archival and the immediate, the factual and the imagined.

Martin Beck’s practice is deeply engaged with processes of imaging, broadening our understanding of visual and auditory cultures. The main reference point for his most recent body of works is a series of eleven vinyl records titled environments released between 1969 and 1979 as psychoacoustic tools designed to enhance productivity and well-being. Beck probes these claims, laying bare the rhetoric of a then-nascent industry. Building on this exploration, he contributes four large-scale drawings adorned with fern foliage that probe the themes from sites to sounds, tasks, and time. Additional works cut into the record series’ covers to highlight the visual and verbal dimensions associated with the paradoxical pressures of self-care and self-control in contemporary capitalist culture.

This juxtaposition of Beck and Tieu’s works allows for a reflection on how psychological and physical spaces are constructed as well as for understanding echos as not just an auditory but a historical and cultural experience.

Curated by Mirela Baciak.