SECONDARY SNEAKING

Press Release

BERNHARD LEITNER

Earspacebodysound

“I can hear with my knee better than with my calves.” This statement made by Bernhard Leitner, which initially seems absurd, can be explained in light of an interest that he still pursues today with unbroken passion and meticulousness: the study of the relationship between sound, space, and body.  Since the late 1960s, Bernhard Leitner has been working in the realm between architecture, sculpture, and music, conceiving of sounds as constructive material, as architectural elements that allow a space to emerge. Sounds move with various speeds through a space, they rise and fall, resonate back and forth, and bridge dynamic, constantly changing spatial bodies within the static limits of the architectural framework. Idiosyncratic spaces emerge that cannot be fixed visually and are impossible to survey from the outside, audible spaces that can be felt with the entire body. Leitner speaks of “corporeal” hearing, whereby acoustic perception not only takes place by way of the ears, but through the entire body, and each part of the body can hear differently. 

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In recent years, Bernhard Leitner’s sound/space/body installations, that have always developed at the intersection of sound, sculpture, and architecture, refusing any clear location, have begun to attract the interest of artists from the performing arts. Dancers and performers develop their own choreographies along Leitner’s sound/space/bodies and allow new corporeal and movement spaces to emerge in temporal-spatial performances. They allow themselves to be drawn into a universe in which visual, acoustic, temporal, and physical worlds of experience “coincide,” and “being in sound” becomes a “being in the world.”


http://www.bernhardleitner.at/en?CAKEPHP=f0a135e3420b21cec9da5377652daed2