Sound Art Installation | by Emeka Ogboh

Presented by the Goethe-Institut & Deutschlandfunk

Can you recognize a city by its sounds? For 75 years, the Goethe-Institut has been engaged in international cultural work across 150+ institutes world-wide. This has resulted in numerous publications and presentations featuring music and soundscape recordings. Berlin sound artist Emeka Ogboh was invited to present a personal selection from the global Goethe archive. 

Join us in a Goethe Space deep listening salon as Ogboh takes listeners from Kuala Lumpur to Kolkata over an hour —starting and closing with early work by Canadian sound artist Darren Copeland of NAISA New Adventures in Sound Art (Toronto/Owen Sound). Accompanied by a video of Ogboh contextualizing the work.

Instead of representing the cultural institution’s archive along a linear timeline, Ogboh conceives of the documented material as a condensed fabric of attempts: attempts to listen, to collaborate, to translate; attempts to respond to specific historical, cultural, and political constellations. These manifest themselves through sounds from different decades and regions in structures of simultaneity, superimposition, and repetition.

Sound artist Emeka Ogboh, born in Nigeria in 1977, lives in Berlin. In his work, he explores how individual and collective memories can be translated into sensory experiences. He became interested in sound art during a media class at the 2008 Fayoum Winter Academy with Austrian multimedia artist Harald Scherz. Ogboh is known for Lagos State of Mind III, blending his signature audio archive from Lagos with recordings made in Berlin, and Song of the Germans, a sonar commentary on nationalism and racism. Emeka Ogboh has excited at documenta 14, Venice Biennale, MoMA, Tate Modern, Humboldt Forum and beyond.

Read the project description and Archival Extraction Log.