The art spaces Neun Kelche and Display are teaming up once again to give carte blanche to artists Emilie Ding and Alizée Lenox. Under the project Move Along Before the Sun Rises, the two artists used the empty space and its sonic properties throughout the month of March and April in the form of a residency and sound salon. It takes the form of a multichannel sound piece featured during the sound intervention and listening session on April 5 at 6:30 pm at Neun Kelche, in Berlin. It will also be part of the Sound Series, an online audio project with various guests.
94 square meters, 338.2 cubic meters. The space, located at Pasadegplatz 3-4, 13088 Berlin, Weissensee, unfurls its large bay window onto the street, thus revealing its sheer volume. The space is empty.
Formerly the neighbourhood’s only supermarket, Kaiser’s – the storeline, bought by Edeka and Rewe after legal battles, no longer exists – enlivened and supplied the area. Part of the program for artistic working space by Kulturraum Berlin gGmbH and in cooperation with Gesellschaft für StadtEntwicklung gGmbH (GSE), the building was transformed into artists’ studios. In 2021, the former shop’s storage became Neun Kelche.
Today, after the dismantling of its previous exhibition, in place from December 2024 to end of February 2025, the art space is beginning a seasonal break. The space is empty, completely or almost, though it is still sometimes used to store a few pieces. This eerily resonates with the prevailing climate in Berlin, following drastic budget cuts in the cultural spheres (and others like education or social programs), leading to the closure of numerous venues, and the lurking uncertainty.
The space is empty, and it’s precisely this intermediary state and the apparent unpredictability of its future situation that interests artists Emilie Ding and Alizée Lenox. What does it mean to let a vacant space in Berlin? What does the sign of an empty window case in the urban landscape of a metropolis refer to? When architecture is considered as part of an ever-evolving collective process, as a member of the social body that creates meaning. On a rather individual level, what are the possibilities and projections that this void allows?
The artists have chosen to embrace the absence of the usual presences and visuals through a multichannel sound installation in favor of listening. Thus, as an alternate way to understand and live this type of emptiness, as an invitation to reconsider space and our direct environment through hearing.
Through a sensitive approach to the site and extended field recordings, Emilie Ding and Alizée Lenox write their piece with the reverberations of walls; they sense the large glass windows, the corridors and the electrical appliances. White noise, drones, vibrations and frequencies are amplified from Neun Kelche’s premises. The acousmatic sounds, assembled into a composition where the interplay of sources—chosen for their vibratory quality and timbre—combined with a multi-diffusion system, draw us into a somatic experience, whilst opening up new fields of mental and sensorial projections.
Emilie Ding & Alizée Lenox work with sound and its materiality to sculpt and arrange elements of field recordings, instruments, and samples into multichannel compositions. Often site-specific, these installations explore the acoustics found within the architectural body of a space to create complex and intricate acousmatic compositions of large amplitude and sensitivity.The resulting experience leads to strong visual evocations that extend beyond the source of the sound, embodying resonance and vibratory qualities.
Neun Kelche is a project space curated by Kira Dell and Laura Seidel at Pasedagplatz in Berlin-Weißensee. In May 2024, the artist Neda Naujokaitė joined the team in the area of press and public and public relations and as assistant curator to the team. Since the beginning of 2021, local artists have found a space for exchange and encounters here. The program is shaped by the local community and developed further in collaborations on a national and international level. Neun Kelche works mainly with FLINTA* artists. In solo or duo exhibitions, site-specific installations are created, which are expanded performatively or with film/video/sound. The curatorial work of Kira Dell and Laura Seidel is based on a fundamentally power-critical and intersectional perspective. Thematically, they focus in particular on utopias of the planetary coexistence of human and non-human agents, ideas of collective love, social perspectives on parenthood and the potential for action of artistic materials. Instead of prescribing a rigid curatorial program, a collaborative negotiation process and in-depth studio visits are used to find thematic overlaps with artists and develop the exhibitions together. The Neun Kelche team takes a critical look at the working structures in the art world and the starting point of the curatorial work is to develop an exhibition program.
The project is kindly supported by Pro Helvetia – Swiss arts council and the Berlin Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhaltorted by Pro Helvetia