Bernhard Leitner

For more than 50 years, Bernhard Leitner has been working across media at the interface of acoustics, architecture, sculpture, and artistic research. His work allows us to understand sound anew – as more than just an acoustic phenomenon, as something that develops spatially, physically, and architecturally. Using sculptural forms, loudspeaker constellations, and architectural structures, Leitner makes sound movement itself the material of composition: waves that penetrate the body, crash against it, or circle around it. His installations demand not only attention but also presence; they encourage us to hear how sound restructures the experience of space, how it affects the body not metaphorically but quite materially. Sound thus becomes a medium for both the creation and destabilization of architectural experience.

At a time when sound experience is often reduced to background or PA systems, Leitner insists on slowness and intimacy, on the participation of the listening body in the creation of space. In his practice, space does not appear as a static container, but as an activated field, charged by vibrations, rhythms, and proximity. Thus, his sound architecture undertakes a form of phenomenological inquiry, in which perception is never disembodied and space is always in flux. In a world where we are constantly surrounded by noise, Bernhard Leitner reminds us that sound can also be a way of creating space around us. He makes art that we not only hear, but into which we enter.

We thank the main sponsor of the exhibition