Hamburger Bahnhof, Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin
12.04.-22.09.2024

Tsabar’s first institutional solo show in Germany focuses on four bodies of work fusing visual and acoustic experiences. The show includes over 20 wall and floor-based pieces that were distributed across the entire exhibition space, relating and responding to one another.

In the Work on Felt series, Tsabar uses felt lined with carbon fiber; by tightening a piano string attached to each piece of felt, she creates a sculptural work and simultaneously transforms it into a modifiable string instrument. In the Inversion series, works are embedded in the walls of exhibition spaces, penetrating the architectural structures and revealing their interior cavities. The audience can elicit sounds from these cavities by reaching into the openings she has made in the walls and plucking or strumming hidden string elements, speaking or singing into the space, or simply moving their body. In the series Melody of Certain Damage, Tsabar appropriates the iconic gesture of smashing a guitar; she transforms this destructive act into a sculptural work, which in turn becomes a playable musical instrument. Twilight (Gaffer Wall) (2007/2024) is a site-specific installation Tsabar first presented in 2007. Gaffer tape – a material that is used, among other things, to secure cables at concerts – here moves up the wall, where it leads into the exhibition like a curtain at the entrance to a nightclub. The material vocabulary of this realm – cables, amplifiers, microphones, gaffer tape – is employed and exposed in all of the works in the exhibition. Tsabar lends visibility to these often unseen materials, incorporating them into a constructive network that links the exhibited works and corresponds to the movement of sound.

Naama Tsabar’s exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof is also the first in a series of temporary solo exhibitions by contemporary artists to be shown in parallel with the presentation of Joseph Beuys’s works in the Kleihueshalle.

Installation and performance photography © Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Laura Fiorio and Jacopo La Forgia