Musik Installationen Nürnberg is a festival for music as performative spatial art. In a departure from the closedness of historically linear thinking and the associated dramaturgies of Western-influenced art music, this festival seeks the openness and expanse of musical landscapes, and thus aims to valorise space and spatiality as a central musical moment of experience. Accordingly, music installations are musical-performative situations that represent a fundamentally different understanding of spatiality and temporality and thus take into account a non-linear understanding of history that tends to situate us in a perpetual, opaque present.
Formally, they place themselves precisely in an as yet unexplored intermediate field of performing arts, in clear demarcation from already existing art forms: in similar temporality to sound art, but with living musicians’ bodies; in similar intermediality to opera, but without its narrative dramaturgy; in similar devotion to the acoustic as a concert, but without its segmenting temporal politics and stage situation. The Music Installations concentrate on works that create a spatially and temporally de-hierarchised exhibition situation for the audience.
In its first installment Musik Installationen Nürnberg was a four-day festival from 7–10 July 2022 that presented eight musical installations at various locations and institutions in Nuremberg more or less simultaneously. The audience was invited to move freely and individually between the installations in the city, getting to know not only the different works but also their context in Nuremberg.
Participating artists and collectives in 2022: Isabel Lewis, Nile Koetting, Claire Ruosay, Meetka, Spencer Doran (Visible Cloacks), KMRU, Geoff Witcher & Jack Callahan, Armin Lorenz Gerald, Courtesy & Alex Kassian, Li Yilei, Joyul, Reece Cox, Flashlight O, Sydney Spann, Dania (parallax editions), Hideki Umezawa, Nozomu Matsumoto, Göksu Kunak, Astrit Ismaili, Leroy Char, Annegret Schalke, CREAMCAKE, Ewa Poniatowska, Steve Katona, Lauryn Youden, bod [包家巷], Heinrich Horwitz, Decoder Ensemble (Jonathan Shapiro, Sonja Lena Schmid), Iggy Malmborg, Shlomi Moto Wagner, DJ Baby, Wojtek Blecharz, Vala T. Foltyn, Sall Lam Toro, Phyllis Akinyi, Nicolas Navarro Rueda, Benjamin van Bebber, Leo Hofmann, Jonathan Burrows, Matteo Fargion, Francesca Fargion, Lea Burkhalter, DAF Kollektiv, Lester St. Louis, Chris Williams, Nikima Jagudajev, Louise Trueheart, Vanessa Sindihebura, Emeka Okereke, Adham Hafez, Christoph Haffter, and others.