material #0

Exhibition concept by Cyrill Lim and Marcel Zaes

Cyrill Lim and Marcel Zaes see their joint artistic practice as an exploration of the mutual interactions between space, acoustics, sound and aesthetics. Under the title ‘material #0’, a series of sculptural works has been created since 2010 that now being realised and presented at LAGE EGAL in Berlin and Orbital Garden in Bern.
The situation on site is taken into account by relating aspects of the exhibition directly to the architecture of the space. Consequently, the available premises will strongly guide the approach, as Lim/Zaes' works consider the space visually and acoustically as parameters. As a result, the exhibited works will vary in each room and be realised in new versions.

The starting point for the works is the sonority of material: electromechanical transducers are used to conduct impulses and vibrations into the material, causing it to resonate. The resonance developed by a material depends on its properties or those of its components, on the dimensions of the object used, and on the exhibition space itself.
The spatial arrangement, and thus both the interaction between the individual works and the interaction between the works and the architecture, is another important parameter of the exhibition. In this respect, Lim/Zaes' working method constantly oscillates between sound, space and image, reflecting their artistic practice, which is difficult to assign to a specific genre and has manifested itself in the past as pieces of music in concert halls, as conceptual works in paper form, or as sculptures in galleries.

The oscillation in Lim/Zaes' working method also ensures that the thematic core of the work remains intact: the physically tangible material. In addition to the acoustic properties described above, its pure presence in the exhibition context is also of interest. On the other hand, when materials such as stone, wood or glass are positioned in the context of an exhibition or altered from their original form, they already undergo a process of abstraction and the material may no longer appear as the material itself. The result is sculptures that are primarily self-referential and whose design and sound develop from their own physical qualities. What Lim/Zaes do as artists is to create the external structure of the arrangement and the temporal structure of the sound intervention. They understand the latter as a composition with non-musical sound sources, the sequence of which is defined by a mathematical algorithm that ensures that the rhythmic design changes constantly, thereby defining a temporality. The objects placed in the space will thus simultaneously exhibit visual qualities as sculptures and sonic qualities as instruments, causing the entire exhibition space to resonate. The nature of the existing exhibition space will influence the algorithm and, in turn, the temporal structure of the installation.

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