The exhibition EXTENDED COMPOSITIONS highlights the various linkages between the visual arts and music in terms of the structural interfacing of the two disciplines and, in the process, makes a new and independent form of artistic practice visible, audible, and tangible. Starting from ideas such as that of synaesthesia, devised by Russian composer Alexander Scriabin who with his ‘colour piano’ opened music out to art, or the thoughts on counterpoint by Hans Richter, who as a visual artist transposed musical notions into the visual and filmic domains, the exhibition presents a new artistic practice that spans the whole gamut of musical and visual composition. The works on display combine music and the visual arts in a decidedly non-hierarchical, yet interactive, audio-visual manner. In this way they reflect the formal foundations of these art forms and the transgression involved. The focus here is not on an additive illustration or setting images to music, but on a structural linkage of the two forms of expression. EXTENDED COMPOSITIONS enables a multi-sensory, indeed inter-sensory perception of music and the visual arts, and focuses on interdisciplinary discourse.

Works from the fields of film, video, installation, painting, music and sound offer different perspectives on the exhibition’s theme and also spotlight new and unusual connections. Staged as a tour, the artistic pieces enter into dialogue with one another and can thus best be grasped in terms of their respective location. Kunsthaus Pasquart provides ideal conditions for this in the form of sequential, respectively coherent spaces in which the works have an independent effect but which also interact with each other. The exhibition at Kunsthaus Pasquart continues the EXTENDED COMPOSITIONS exhibition and concert project which first took place in Berlin in 2015, in what is now a far larger setting. The exhibition will be accompanied on the evening of 6 May 2017 by a concert at Schweizer Opernstudio Biel that will explore the interstices between musical and spatial/visual compositions with both premiere and debut performances by international artists and musicians.