Low on Noise Cancelling

What does plastic sound like? What does physical disorientation sound like?

The Live-Set by Jung An Tagen and the Listening-Performance by Apophenia (Paula Backer, Samo Zeicen) take place within the exhibition project High on Distortion, Low on Reception.

The two live sound sessions are dedicated to listening as a practice of turning toward the unfiltered or the seemingly disruptive. Sound is treated as a resistant material in its own right. Apopheniaconjures sonic figures from plastic materials, while Jung An Tagen generates powerful acoustic phenomena that destabilize perception and evoke dissociative computer music.

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.

Artists: Natalia Dominguez Rangel, Jung An Tagen, Marlene Kager, Christina Kubisch / Peter Kutin / Florian Kindlinger, Suchart Wannaset, Hui Ye in collaboration with Qu Chang, Samo Zeichen / Paula Backer

Curated by Elisabeth Falkensteiner, Nora Mayr

High on Distortion, Low on Reception – a collaboration between kex—kunsthalle exnergasse and Klima Biennale Wien

Supported by the Otto Mauer Fonds