Introduction

In 1989, a traveling exhibition Broken Music started in West Berlin, which had its finger on the pulse of the time. The person behind it: Ursula Block, owner of ‘gelbe MUSIK’ (1981 – 2014), a small yet world-famous record store in Berlin-Wilmersdorf: everyone visiting the city would drop by, including influential artists and musicians such as John Cage, Yoko Ono, Sonic Youth and Björk.

Following this influential exhibition, Broken Music Vol. 2 looks at artists' engagement with the vinyl record and music in a broader sense over the past seven decades. The exhibition presents 700 records, sound pieces and immersive media installations, arranged in ten chapters that explore links between the fields of music and visual art

Among the works presented will be Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's magisterial Opera (QM.15)which transforms a recording of the artist’s live apparition as Maria Callas into a holographic illusion that creates a ghostly operatic presence in a large dark and empty space. Opera (QM.15) fuses multiple temporal layers: the looped holographic projection of DGF’s live apparition of the famous diva is itself a construct of the younger Maria Callas’s voice clothed in the iconic red dress of the opera singer’s final performances.

The exhibition is curated by Sven Beckstette and Ingrid Buschmann, curators at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart.

The music records presented in Broken Music Vol. 2 come from the Nationalgalerie collection, which managed to acquire an extensive collection of records from Ursula Block in 2019 with the help of the Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung and the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung. Thanks to the support of the Friends of the Nationalgalerie and numerous donations, this collection has now been expanded and updated.