High on Distortion, Low on Reception

Artists: Natalia Dominguez Rangel, Jung An Tagen, Marlene Kager, Christina Kubisch / Peter Kutin / Florian Kindlinger, Suchart Wannaset, Hui Ye

Curated by Elisabeth Falkensteiner, Nora Mayr

Loud and faint, perceptible and obscured, the group exhibition High on Distortion, Low on Reception explores the sounds of our present – layered with noise, lost in resonance. At the core is their role as communication, sensation, and cultural experience.

Poetic and analytical, the artistic works explore the multifaceted potentials of sound as a medium – beyond aesthetic categories or semantics. They reveal hidden, often threatening aspects of our acoustic worlds: the rumble of human interventions in the oceans, the silencing of insects, the hum of invisible electromagnetic fields, or growling acoustic aggression. In the exhibition, visitors encounter sound as a political and affective form of articulation but also as an expression of cultural identity. At the same time, it manifests as an instrument of social control, a trigger for altered perception, or a trace inscribed in ecologies, spaces, and memories.