Discover Cevdet Erek's "Secession Ornamentation": Sound, Space, and Architecture Exhibition

This exhibition features site-specific installations and sound environments by Cevdet Erek that explore the concept of 'sound ornamentation.' The artist transforms the Secession building's facade into a vibrantly audible surface, engaging with Adolf Loos's critique of ornament and its broader social, gendered, and colonial implications.

Cevdet Erek's exhibition "Secession Ornamentation" delves into the concept of "sound ornamentation," interrogating Adolf Loos's influential text "Ornament and Crime" and its historical implications. Loos's polemic, which associated ornament with sensuality, femininity, and irrationality, marginalized the connection between ornament and abstraction and exposed colonialist and patriarchal underpinnings of modernist aesthetics. Erek recontextualizes this discourse by creating temporary, vibrating structures that organize space and perception, turning sound itself into architecture. Speakers are placed symmetrically on the exterior walls of the Secession, visually and acoustically accentuating the iconic building and transforming its facade into a palpable surface. The repetitive rhythmic patterns mark and reconfigure the building's geometry, while referencing elements like traffic signals for the visually impaired, thereby highlighting how space is organized through systems of guidance, control, and care. Further exploring symmetry and perception, the placement of 'L' and 'R' letters on the facade plays with the concept of stereophonic sound, the bilateral nature of human hearing, and the ideological divisions structuring the political spectrum. This work is part of Erek's broader engagement with local architectures and social histories across various cities. In the Graphic Cabinet, the exhibition emphasizes the tactile experience with wooden reliefs designed to be felt, inspired by Braille symbols on speaker boxes at pedestrian crossings. These elements underscore Erek's focus on physical positioning and the integration of the visitor's entire body into the experience of shared architecture, where rhythm functions as both a spatial and social principle fostering collective experience through resonance and togetherness rather than purity or control.

Visitor information and tickets can be found via a provided link to the Secession's ticketing portal. General opening hours are Tuesday to Sunday, 10 AM to 6 PM. Information about admission is available on the 'Informationen & Tickets' page of the Secession website.