Performing Space for the Public: Mischa Kuballs’ light-sound-installation res.o.nant in dialogue with Daniel Libeskind’s ‘Voids’ at the Jewish Museum Berlin

A contribution by Dr. Silke Walther.

“The official name of the project is ‘Jewish Museum’ but I have named it ‘Between the Lines’ because for me it is about two lines of thinking, organization and relationship One is a straight line, but broken into many fragments, the other is a tortuous line, but continuing indefinitely.”

Daniel Libeskind

„Libeskind is not merely translating his architectural designs into a building … (…) going through the winding hallways of his museums, their ghostly quality resonates with [Paul] Celan’s poetic structures of the uncanny.”

Eric Kligerman, Sites of the Uncanny. Paul Celan, Specularity and the Visual Arts, Berlin 2012

„It [ the Jüdische Museum Berlin] feels almost like a fortress, so sound is an appropriate medium to circumnavigate these restrictions within the space.”

Mischa Kuball, 2018

Since the completion of the prominent new building complex by the New York architect Daniel Libeskind on an area of Kreuzberg where the first Jewish Museum in Berlin was located until 1938, almost 20 years have passed. The Berlin museum and memorial landscape has developed just as rapidly during this time as the gentrification of centrally located districts of Berlin is likely to change. While the world-famous museum in the midst of these upheavals may appear to be an unmistakable architectural landmark of the city, it is still a strictly guarded building to enter through a security gate in the baroque entrance building, whose hermetic shielding from the urban environment marks it as a cultural institution particularly worthy of protection. The institutional success story of the Jewish Museum, a federal institution, is also remarkable in a European context. Between the planning of a new building for the Berlin Museum and the then affiliated “Jewish Department” and the opening of a museum dedicated to Jewish-German culture and history in the so-called “post-reunification period”, hardly a decade passed. However, this brought profound changes not only for the Berliners but for all  …

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Image caption: res.o.nant – Jüdisches Museum – Mischa Kubal – Foto Alexander Basile, Cologne