Sound Is Liquid

Sound Is Liquid catalogues an exhibition at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig (mumok) in Vienna, running from late 2021 into the spring of 2022. It gathers work that treats sound as subject and material both, tracing a thread through Wolfgang Tillmans's career that runs back to the club culture of his earliest photographs.

The show paired photography with installation, video, and sound pieces, and the book follows that mix rather than flattening it into a single medium. Music runs through the material at every level. Tillmans has long photographed club and rave scenes. He has released his own music as well. Between the two, the exhibition reads as an argument about listening, not only looking. George T. Baker, Diedrich Diederichsen, Elisabeth Karola Kraus, Élisabeth Lebovici, and Felicity D. Scott contribute essays. Matthias Michalka edited the volume, and the writers address sound art, club culture, and Tillmans's exhibition practice from several angles.

Tillmans was born in 1968 in Remscheid, Germany, and came up through the Hamburg and London club scenes of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Dance music has stayed close to his photographic and curatorial work ever since. Sound Is Liquid joins two other site-specific survey catalogues from the same period: the Centre Pompidou installation Nothing Could Have Prepared Us, and the multi-venue exhibition To Look Without Fear. Each is built around a different institutional space rather than a fixed retrospective format.