by Dagmara Genda // May 15, 2026
This article is part of our feature topic Scale.
The focus on music in this year’s programming at the Hamburger Bahnhof is indicative of a larger trend that has been going on for a number of years, but has really picked up momentum in the last 15 or so. Just as music festivals, such as Maerzmusik, have been looking to strategies from galleries and museums to break through the audience-performer divide, so have museums been programming music, not only as public events parallel to their exhibition format, but as a material that can be used by artists. Sâadane Afif’s ‘Preludes,’ Petrit Halilaj‘s ‘An Opera Out of Time,’ the recently closed ‘OFF SCORE’ by Annika Kahrs as well as the recently opened ‘We Make Years Out of Hours’ by Lina Lapelytė represent a notable concentration of musically-oriented programming. In most cases, it seems music, even when produced for the occasion, comes in the form of a kind of ready-made, a sociocultural phenomenon laden with its own stereotypes, projections and institutional structures, which, when taken out of its usual habitat, could (hopefully) destabilize or expand the mechanisms of art.
Annika Kahrs: ‘A Cashier’s Opera,’ 2025, film still, 4K video, color, sound, 35 min. // © Courtesy Annika Kahrs and Produzentengalerie Hamburg
Following this narrative, as would be expected, the appropriated genre is often used in a fairly positive or uncritical way. Music is employed as a kind of remedy for the isolationism, the elitism and perhaps also the literalness of art. Within the gallery context, it can appear as an accompanying soundtrack, a de facto means of communal experience or in the way Kandinsky and Mondriaan once looked up to music—as a form whose, to cite Douglas Kahn from his essay ‘The Sound of Music,’ “abstracted character was thought to have already achieved what the other arts were attempting.” These things were understood to be: “self-containment, self-reflexivity and unmediated communication.” Whether or not the poaching of other genres with their accompanying public presentation practices is successful might ultimately depend on what side of the equation you are coming from. If you are the composer or musician struggling with the conventions of the bourgeois concert hall, whose form ultimately stems from the church service, then a museum or gallery might be a refreshing reprieve. If you are an artist grappling with the silent, untouchability of the marketable art object, then music and its conventions can bring a welcome dematerialization and democratization. In the end, the lesson to be learned might not be one of form or practice, but one of context and perspective.
Saâdane Afif: ‘Five Preludes,’ 2025-26, installation view at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, depicted: ‘The Fountain Archives (Index),’ 2022 // © Saâdane Afif, 2025 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, courtesy of the artist & Mehdi Chouakri, Berlin, photo by Jacopo La Forgia
Extending the possibilities of context and perspective is precisely what Sâadane Afif aims to do with his use of musical metaphor when he conceives of his shows as “Preludes.” He understands each artwork and even exhibition as a launching point into a larger interpretative machine, or in his own words, into “something that transcends them.” His is the only soundless exhibition. Its relation to music is developed through appropriated musical terminology, concert posters and so-called lyrics, which will be eventually interpreted and performed by various Berlin-based musicians in different concert venues throughout May and June.
His position within the musical genre can be seen as a kind of parasitical one, where he takes what he needs out of music to expand on the structures of art. The musical ideas, however, are a set of idealized assumptions and associations, which he, in reference to ‘Citizen Kane,’ calls his “Rosebud.” Afif’s musical experience is nestled in the nostalgia common to formative experiences; it stems from a childhood rock band that has since become his model, or prelude if you will, to collective creation. The lyrics, which adorn the walls of each room of the show in small Letraset letters, are verses written by friends and colleagues in response to photos of in-process works. What is ultimately seen in the museum are the finished works with the reactions—some funny, some thoughtful, others forced or dull—from a variety of (often) well-known friends. Because the lyrics were written during the process of creation, their feedback funnels back into the work in what Afif calls a “cloud of meaning,” a term that also describes their wispy, background presences in the show. At the same time, the artist positions himself as a kind of knot binding together an impressive network of art world names, all of which amplify the echo chamber of interpretation and validation that he already examines as a general theme in his work. One such series, also on display in ‘Preludes’ is his cheeky ‘The Fountain Archives’ (2008-2020) where he collects images of Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal, frames them and sells them as his own work.
Saâdane Afif: ‘Five Preludes,’ 2025-26, installation view at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, depicted: ‘Soixante mille millimètres d’infinis possibles,’ 2018 // © Saâdane Afif, 2025 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, courtesy of the artist & Mehdi Chouakri, Berlin, photo by Jacopo La Forgia
What is never a question is the type of music that is referenced, could be made or the quality it has. Instead we are invited to think about the reverberation of collective reception through the metaphor of music. This is even the case in his concerts, which do not take place in the museum. Afif emphasizes that the concert is “not a museum performance. It is an artwork that has all the appearance of a concert.” That is to say, it is only something that looks like a concert, which could lead one to conclude it is not about the music, the sound or the experience thereof.
Petrit Halilaj’s ‘Opera Out of Time,’ on the other hand, presents the remnants of a concert as artwork. The show consists of a variety of installations, but primarily the carefully arranged props from his opera ‘Syrigana’ (2025), which is also the name of a village on the border of Albanian and Serbian communities in Kosovo. The composer is Lugh O’Neill, who makes spatial compositions, but also does sound design and soundtrack composition for artists and filmmakers. Originally performed in Syrigana itself, the operatic format, with all its myth, spectacle and tragedy, becomes the medium of collective celebration, mourning, alternative myth-making and maybe even, eventually, reconciliation. Music, in this case, like with Afif, is employed as a means of expanded collective reception and engagement. In Halilaj’s work, theatrical strategies have distancing and cathartic functions. In the guise of animals and via abstract languages, his characters can softly address identity, heritage and political tensions. His use of a particular music, in its sweet, melodic conventionality, refers back to its promise of communal experience and even the modernist desire for “self-reflexivity and unmediated communication.”
Petrit Halilaj: ‘An Opera Out of Time,’ 2025-26, installation view at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart // © Petrit Halilaj, 2025 / mennour, Paris, ChertLüdde, Berlin and kurimanzutto, New York and Mexico City, photo by Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie / Jacopo La Forgia
Annika Kahrs, whose ‘OFF SCORE’ just closed on May 3rd, is the only artist of the three who has exploited the conventions of music most directly, though the newest videos in the East Wing of Hamburger Bahnhof have relaxed into a kind of Gesamtwerk strategy, where motifs are arranged together on the occasion of an opportunity, but not fuelled by a particular investigation or feeling of necessity. Where early pieces like ‘Strings’ (2010) playfully displaced the expectations of performance and virtuosity, or videos like ‘Playing to the Birds’ (2013) humorously addressed aesthetic reception and musical referentiality, a work like ‘A Cashier’s Opera’ (2025) only vaguely points to urban transformation by inserting different, even random, genres of music into the decaying non-place of the shopping centre. At one point a string quartet plays a work that is directed by security personnel, at another point a DJ is discovered playing alone after hours in the Mall of Berlin, or a group of teenagers dressed as zombies loiter around the sterile hallways of an anonymous mall to later form an a cappella choir. Nowhere were cashiers themselves to be seen, though the title prompts a comparison with an older work by composer Lina Lapelytė. ‘Have a Good Day!’ (2011), an opera made with Vaiva Grainytė and Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, featured a row of women dressed in aprons, lit by harsh fluorescent lights, singing about their hopes, their bladders, their monotonous shifts in the supermarket. The contrast between the drama expected of opera and the mundane repetition of the working day, the class differences between the performed reality and the usual opera audience, were put into a tension through a pointed manipulation of form and content. This focus is what Kahrs’ work obviously lacked.
Annika Kahrs: ‘A Cashier’s Opera,’ 2025, film still, 4K video, color, sound, 35 min. // © Courtesy Annika Kahrs and Produzentengalerie Hamburg
When not working with already written music, Kahrs commissions composer and sound artist Louis d’Heudières to musically embody her ideas. For ‘A Cashier’s Opera,’ d’Heudières was charged with composing muzak, or for her video of a marching band in a small Italian village, ‘La Banda’ (2024), he, says Kahrs, “immediately understood the images and emotions I had in mind; based on these ideas, he composed a piece for the orchestra to play.” Though this is not always the case in their collaborations, as with ‘Gravity’s Tune’ (2023), which has closer affinities with d’Heudières’ own work, here illustrations or even clichés of musical cultures were produced as ready-mades for a somewhat sentimental and somewhat unfocussed activation of a space. One could imagine that something similar could be achieved through the use of AI, which effortlessly conjures musical styles based on preconceived ideas.
Annika Kahrs: ‘La Banda,’ 2024, film still, 4K, color, sound, 22 min. // © Courtesy Annika Kahrs und Produzentengalerie Hamburg
The promise of music meeting with practice is perhaps most playfully achieved by Lina Lapelytė, whose ‘We Make Years Out of Hours’ fills the main hall of the museum with 400,000 wooden cubes; they cover the entire floor, are piled, arranged and built into various structures. The immense quantity of freshly cut limber envelops the hall with the fragrance of carpentry, while also evoking childhood building blocks, thus merging the grandiosity of scale with the intimacy of play. Twenty-five singers, from amateur to professional, repeat fragments of poems to music. They are not a chorus, but individual voices that call, respond, announce or simply melodize. And while the work is not a musical revelation, it does use individual voices to form a fractured togetherness, evoking theorist Christian Grüny’s article on music in museums, in which he questions the stubborn topos of listening to live music as communal experience. He asks if we are really listening together or just at the same time? In this sense, musical performance stands as a process, a question mark, even if it is also guided by a sense of hope.
Lina Lapelytė: ‘We Make Years Out of Hours,’ 2026-27, installation view at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin // © Lina Lapelytė. VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2026, photo Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie / art/beats, Florian Mag
The concert as artwork, music as metaphor, the opera as communal action; behind these roles lies a certain expectation of what music is or can do, as well as, of course, the already well-established ability of art to transform anything—dance, theater, cooking—into a malleable medium for the artist’s vision. At some point, however, this mutability can reach its limits. Can music, which itself is a complex cultural and material practice, be so easily applied as a material or metaphor? And how long will it be able to expand the interpretative potential of art, before it itself gets absorbed by the codes of the museum? How communal can a concert in a gallery really be? While mixing genres can be novel, stimulating and provocative, the more utopian aspects of this mix can be bound up with wishful thinking. Perhaps communality and interpretative potential in art are just as dependent on factors external to art. How would a universal income change the make-up of opera audiences? Would shorter workdays and more leisure allow people to linger longer than 30 seconds in front of an art object? Would low prices affect the aura of an art object? Would giving up on limited editions and a claim to uniqueness change how they look? This shift in context and perspective could potentially make old structures take new form, but they are not ones an artist can realistically enact. They would need a larger change, one that, like Lapelytė’s multitudes of voices and cubes in one place, will likely always be in process.
Exhibition Info
Hamburger Bahnhof
Petrit Halilaj: ‘An Opera Out of Time’
Exhibition: Sept. 11, 2025–May 31, 2026
smb.museum/petrit-halilaj
Saâdane Afif: ‘Five Preludes’
Exhibition: Dec. 12, 2025–Sept. 13, 2026
smb.museum/saadane-afif
Lina Lapelytė. We Make Years Out of Hours
Exhibition: May 1, 2026–Jan. 10, 2027
smb.museum/lina-lapelyte
Invalidenstraße 50, 10557 Berlin, click here for map
