Generation Z : ReNoise

Russian Pioneers of Sound Art and Musical Technology in the Early 20th Century at Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin

Evgeny Sholpo working with the first version of the Variophone in 1932. Courtesy of Marina Sholpo

The Generation Z: ReNoise exhibition assembles rare original early sound equipment and explores the fate of researchers, sound experimentalists, and inventors active during a Russian period of revolution, war, and dictatorship in the first decades of the last century.

Generation Z: ReNoise is assembled and curated by Andrey Smirnov, former founding director of the Theremin Center for Electroacoustic Music at the Moscow State Conservatory and head of its Sector for Media Technology, in collaboration with Liubov Pchelkina, researcher at the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Premiering in Berlin as part of the exhibition is ReNoise, a collaboration with researchers and artists Konstantin Dudakov-Kashuro, Peter Aidu, and Evgenia Vorobyeva, exploring the unique proletarian amateur noise music culture that thrived in post-revolution Russia.

Generation Z is an ongoing project by Andrey Smirnov and Liubov Pchelkina that attempts to restore the censored history and culture of the Russian artistic Utopia of the 1910s and 1920s, which was destroyed through its collision with the totalitarian state of the 1930s.

ReNoise

An early Soviet noise band

The ReNoise part of the exhibition explors the unique proletarian amateur noise music culture that thrived in post-revolution Russia. The complementary project to Andrey Sminrov and Liubov Pchelkina’s “Generation Z” research project sheds light on two main components of early Soviet noise art uniting these together for the first time. Through a variety of handmade proletarian instruments, the project explores amateur noise bands that were widely spread across post-revolutionary Russia. In a second section, a special selection of reconstructions of the more than 200 mechanical noise instruments invented by Vladimir Popov between the 1920-1950s will be displayed. This particular history remains hidden until today, partly due to the neglect typical of the Socialist Realism era, and partly because only a small amount of evidence has been preserved.

Reconstruction of Soviet noise instruments

Kunstraum Kreuzberg – Bethanien, Berlin

Opening: 24.01.2014, 19:00

Runs: 25.1–23.2.2014