Art does not stand apart from the world and its complicated histories. Art is always and inextricably of and about the world. There is no such thing as ‘pure’ art. To be a good artist, one must be a historian, a writer, a philosopher, an anthropologist, a scientist, a doctor, a lawyer, a detective, a poet, whose language is image and sound. The 18 works by 20 artists from 14 countries which comprise the exhibition (UN)SOUNDS OF BUCHENWALD encompass an equal diversity of views built upon the personal experiences of a multiplicity of cultures by individuals who have come to the Bauhuas-Universität, Weimar, to continue their study of contemporary art in the MFA degree program Public Art and New Artistic Strategies. In coming to Weimar from Asia, the Middle East, North and South America, and across Europe, they encounter a living city built upon the most complex of paradoxes; the juxtaposition of some of the greatest minds and talents in the history of German art, culture, and politics – Goethe, Schiller, the founders of the Weimar Republic, and those of the Bauhuas – with the unspeakable legacy of the Holocaust in the form of the Buchenwald concentration camp within walking distance from the city center. Confronting these seemingly mutually exclusive layers of history, these artists are asked to address the universal truth of the Holocaust through the rarifying lens of personal understanding, through the breadth of their experiences, emotions, and senses – with a particular focus on the sense of sound, and its opposite, silence. The resulting works – encompassing video and audio installations, performance, photography, sculptural installation, sound sculpture, transcribed choreography, and conceptual works – all address the particular history of Buchenwald as a physical place alongside the communal history of the horrors it represents. These works address history through its echoes in the present; an auditory analogy which is used equally to express sound and memory.

Just as the artists in this exhibition translate their diversity of backgrounds and approaches into visual art, so too is the exhibition itself an act of translation. Opening first at a gallery in the former Disinfection Building in the Buchenwald Memorial, the exhibition subsequently travels to the MOMENTUM Gallery in Berlin, to be translated and re-formed within the context of another historic building: the Kunstquartier Bethanien. Originally a religious institution built as a hospital and school for nurses in 1847 by the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, the Bethanien remained an active hospital until 1970. Since that time, it fought off threats of demolition to turn itself into a cultural institution with a colorful history full of squatters and anarchists, punk concerts and citizens’ collectives, activists and artists who thrive there to the present day. Situated only a few meters away from the former path of the Berlin Wall, the Bethanien built around itself a cultural community at the apex of the divide between East and West. Divided no longer, Berlin nevertheless is inevitably defined by its paradoxical legacies of astounding cultural and scientific output alongside the horrors of the Third Reich and the repressive division which followed it.

What will happen when we translate an exhibition made for the Buchenwald Memorial to another kind of memorial, a historic building perpetually reinventing itself? From former disinfection hall to former hospital; from a place of death to a locus of life; how will the works in the exhibition be altered through this new context?