Christian Naujoks

Christian Naujoks’ artistic practice moves between music, visual art, and artistic research. He develops works that address the fragility of hearing and disclose experiences of body and sound as processual events. In this context, the artist approaches composition as an extended field in which spatial and social processes unfold across different media and situations. Naujoks’ interdisciplinary practice encompasses sound installations, film, graphic and textual notations, sculptural works, musical compositions, as well as participatory and performative settings.

For Kunstverein Bielefeld, the artist is conceiving a new multichannel sound work along with spatial settings for expanded listening. The work explores the transition from language into music and the dissolution of language into noise. Voice, spoken texts, rhythm, and sound become compositional material, intertwining and flowing into one another. The exhibition explores how sounds settle in the body, persist in memory, and leave traces behind. Something sinks away, while something else rises to the surface; the past returns to the present as an inner hum, noise, or sensation.

Naujoks’ engagement with listening and hearing begins with the diversity of individual auditory experiences and opens up a perspective on different conditions and possibilities of audibility. This perspective also finds expression in a text developed specifically for the sound installation, which follows a movement of thought that takes listening beyond its habitual understanding. Beginning with sound and the physical processes of hearing—the vibration of air, the movement of the eardrum, the fluttering of the tiniest of hairs—the text leads into the interior of auditory experience. The question “Can you hear yourself listening?” opens onto a broader inquiry into the permeability of boundaries and the transitions involved in listening.

The exhibition turns its attention to situations of shared perception and attention. A printed word can be alongside a spoken word, a way of looking can complement a sound, and a gesture can enable communication.

The exhibition continues Kunstverein Bielefeld’s engagement this year with the sensory organ of the “ear” and extends its research into diverse forms of hearing and sensory diversity.

Curated by Victoria Tarak.