CTM 2023's Portals morph into curatorial shapes through which to make contact with specific modes of experience, histories, communities, and speculative futures – and to reflect on the preconditions, thresholds, regulation, and fundamental function of sound and music as gateways to other realities.
This 24th edition of CTM will feature a notable focus on South Asian electronic music, a showcase of collaborations between African and German artists via the Afropollination project, and sonic portals that run the gamut of psychotropic journeys, intimate melancholia, experiences of war, ceremonies of grief and renewal, and full-blown hyperdrive club nights. A multi-layered collaboration with sister festival transmediale will highlight several multi-disciplinary projects as well as a night of ritualistic noise and post-punk digital mayhem. With longstanding partner MONOM, an evening dedicated to newly-commissioned immersive soundworks that explore interplays between analogue and digital instrumentation will be presented in 4DSOUND. A first-time partnership with KW Institute for Contemporary Art will bridge art and music worlds with a multidisciplinary performance. A multi-day Discourse programme and A2A workshop series round out the festival programme.
Full CTM 2023 Programme HERE.
CTM 2023 Highlights
Exhibition: »We Found Our Own Reality«
Opening 27 January 2023 at silent green Betonhalle
Runs 28 - 5 February 2023
Developed and curated by Paul Purgas, this large-scale exhibition brings together architecture, furniture, textiles, and sound to explore India's first electronic music studio, founded in 1969 at the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad – as well as a new soundwork, developed by Paul Purgas from a collection of unheard recordings by five previously unknown Indian electronic composers. On rotation within the exhibition will be the »Zigzag Afterlives« film programme curated by Nancy Adajania, which engages with a set of epiphanic film experiments made by Indian artists, filmmakers, and composers during the 1960s and 1970s. Further elements will flush out this exhibition during the festival week, such as a one-day discourse programme that will reflect upon exchanges and resonances between the Indian and global experimental music and design communities both historically and into the present, plus a series of live musical events within the exhibition space.
Full info HERE.
Installation: »Gilunu: I Became One With You«
Opening performance 1 February 2023 at 19:00 at Kunstquartier Bethanien Studio 1
Installation runs 2 February 2023 14 - 18:00
Closing performance 2 February 2023 at 19:00
Gilunu – meaning »to be immersed« or »submerged« in Sinhala – plays with our total and constant immersion in sound by exploring resonance and space as instruments through a live performance installation. Isuru Kumarasinghe from Sri Lanka, winner of this year’s CTM Radio Lab commission from Deutschlandfunk Kultur and CTM, proposes to continue his explorations on the resonance of sympathetic strings and space activated by voice and Esraj, using its resonance along with field recordings as the sonic source of an eternal resonating chamber. The sound installation opens and closes with a live performance and runs over the course of one day.
Full info HERE.
Concert and Discourse: »The Ghosts Are Returning«
Post-documentary music theatre performance: 3 & 4 February 19:00 at HAU1
Talks & panels: 3 & 4 February 15:00 at HAU2
The collective of artists from Congo, Switzerland, and Germany GROUP50:50 tell the story of seven pygmy skeletons brought to Geneva from Congo by a Swiss doctor in the 1950s. Unlike many African skeletons and skulls languishing in the archives of European museums, the names, approximate origins, dates, and causes of death of these seven skeletons are known, and their descendants – the nomadic Mbuti people of the forests of the Congo, who are resisting loss of their homelands due to illegal deforestation – can be found. But do the descendants want the skeletons and spirits of their ancestors back? A two-day talk programme titled »The Time for Denial is Over« will accompany the evening performances and examine current debates on cultural restitution.
Full info HERE.
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