Heard Melodies Are Sweet But Those Unheard Are Sweeter
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Heard Melodies are Sweet, but Those Unheard are Sweeter

Unheard melodies are sweeter, says John Keats, but what happens when silence becomes the soundtrack of our collective memories? The exhibition Heard Melodies are Sweet, but Those Unheard are Sweeter explores the relationship between sound, silence and memory, through the works of Saâdane Afif, Wallace Berman, Gregor Hildebrandt, Eran Nave, Yehudit Sasportas and Thomas Zipp. These six contemporary artists illustrate that silence, which is often associated with emptiness, can also be a powerful tool for preserving and exploring memories. Utilizing a variety of mixed media, sculpture, video, text and painting, the artists offer a visual representation of mute sound and the way it evokes different layers of memory, from personal memories to memories that are part of a collective experience.

French-born Saâdane Afif, now based in Berlin, expands the process of cross-media translation and sequential collaboration in the lyrics commissioned from artists, writers and musicians, inspired by his artworks. The texts not only question the notion of interpretation and commentary on a piece of art, but have also become a fundamental material of Afif’s artistic practice. They become his works or provide a point of departure for other forms of production, such as performances, songs and objects, which give rise to other texts. In the context of this exhibition, the lyrics imply poetry, rhythm and melody, in a kind of silent sound art.

Wallace Berman was an American artist, a self-taught modernist, hipster, and poet-mystic, whose dual love of music and art often fused in pieces that reveal both musical and visual qualities. The series Verifax Collages, is named after the brand copier he adopted as a main tool for his artmaking in the mid- 1960’s. He always composed these collages while listening to music and as a result music infuses his artwork, explicitly or implicitly. For instance, the portrait of the singer Marianne Faithful is featured in the Verifax Collage presented.

Berlin-based Gregor Hildebrandt has long specialized in outdated recording media – cassette tapes, vinyl records and VHS tapes – focusing not on their capacity for storing and conveying sound, but instead employing them as mute materials, elements with which to create paintings and sculptures that have music buried within them. Resting in silence behind the glossy surface of his analog aesthetics, which verges on black and white monochrome, music haunts his practice. Whether pictorial or sculptural, all of his works contain prerecorded materials, which he references in the titles. These pop-cultural sources, usually a single song, are hidden in the works but can’t be heard. This world of visual poetry is meant to trigger both collective and personal memories.

Eran Nave produced a vinyl record titled Clock Class, featuring the music tracks previously played as part of an installation of sound sculptures called “teleporters.” The teleporter, made of hollow wood, previously served as a loudspeaker and now silently wears a naïve robotic face. Naveh regards the inanimate as living and bestows it with qualities and expressions. Like the sculptures, his paintings are laden with human feelings and seem to be soaked in an emotional tub composed of sadness, anxiety, amazement and longing, inviting us to consider the role of silence in shaping our perception of the past.

Yehudit Sasportas, based in Israel and Berlin, has been exploring for years a seismographic code-language to visualize sounds in her artistic work. Her expressive, abstract gestures stem from her experience of landscape, whereas the straight lines come from the visual translation of her audio recordings – of German swamps, of the Israeli desert, or of her family home. The code she developed conveys the rhythm, volume and silence, and is her way to handle the complexity of information and its emotional intensity in a mute way. The clay mine sculptures in the Lake of Void video act as mute objects, encoded with sound drawings of tree recordings from the Black Forest, as well as Hebrew letters that create poetic sentences. Sunk on submerged German bunkers, the mines activate the repressed, denied and rejected life material that is embedded in the subconscious, or in underground spaces of historical sites.

Berlin-based Thomas Zipp, who began his career as a musician, considers music to be his artistic starting point and feels that his artwork should vibrate like musical sound waves. Zipp works in a various media, ranging from painting and drawing to sculpture, installation and performance with old musical instruments. His works convey an uncanny, at times morbid atmosphere, interweaving aspects of art history, philosophy, science and religion, often reaching deep into the unconscious in search of the unfamiliar and uncoded. In doing so, Zipp uncovers hidden connections or contradictions and integrates them in his artworks, with a playful sense of humor, while searching for their inner sound.