Here They Come And There They Go

Through sound and moving images, Hannah Weinberger creates a choreography in Here They Come And There They Go that unsettles our sense of orientation, bringing awareness to acts of listening and seeing. From one perspective to the next, visitors become co-authors of the exhibition and seismographs of their perception instruments.

The audience immediately becomes the target themselves: in a site-specific video installation, four cameras record the bodies in the space and play them back “live” through different projectors onto the wall. One sees oneself seeing, with one’s own image being fragmented and multiple - and elusive as one approaches it.

In large projected scenes from museums, one sees oneself seeing through others: by slipping into the figures’ backs, looking at their raised mobile phone screens; by following Weinberger’s camera hand and eye as they register frequencies - moments of attraction and aversion - in watching. In the background, a soundtrack plays, in which the artist recites a cappella refrains of well-known songs: a composition of personal-intimate vocal imprints, (pop) cultural code, and technological program.

In the work Eternally…, human and technological perceptual apparatuses increasingly merge. In collaboration with author and musician Fatuma Osman, Weinberger has subtitled striking details of film stills with her own text fragments and edited them into a new storyboard. This primarily tells of the complex and often incomplete processes of memory and meaning production: how they are shaped by continuous (mis)translations between image, sound, and word - and by (cinema) films that inscribe themselves into an individual and collective memory.

Faces greet and bid farewell to us frontally on a double-sided screen. It is a collage of stock videos, whose models appear strangely familiar and detached at the same time. It is a constant fluctuation between closeness and distance when two pairs of eyes meet, look through each other, a film cut occurs, and the search for oneself and others in the projected image begins anew.

In the basement, the focus shifts entirely to sound. Instead of seeing themselves, viewers here listen to themselves in a “portrait gallery” of speakers. Sensors are mounted in between, responding to the body heat of the audience, thus directly influencing the synthetic soundtrack. Like seeing, hearing also sharpens as a dynamic and relational act: as a continuous exploration of resonances and dissonances between human and non-human bodies.

Here They Come And There They Go describes a coming, going, and returning of bodies and melodies, projections and memories - and how new media get involved in it. The exhibition consistently brings the mute to sound: the museum spaces, where sound usually recedes behind the image; the spaces between people and technological companions - and finally a stone. On the museum forecourt, a 3.5-ton boulder prepares visitors for and bids farewell to the exhibition. The boulder reproduces sound from within, with the peculiarities of the solid stone body lending a unique voice to the ephemeral sound track.