A Practice for Everyday Life

Why doesn’t music have a place like a gallery or museum where visitors can come and experience it in their own time, like you would other art forms? Kunsthalle for Music sets out to explore the live exhibition of music-based artworks in a gallery or museum context; it was initiated by Witte de With with Spring Workshop, and was founded by composer Ari Benjamin Meyers, with Defne Ayas and Mimi Brown.

Kunsthalle for Music launched with the symposium Music is Not!, where we used typographic repetition to allude to the tempo of the music itself. To develop the Kunsthalle for Music identity, we researched symbolism within musical annotation, composition and the visualisation of sound. By subverting key elements from these references, we developed a visual language whose connection to music was inferred rather than explicit. We also developed uniforms for the musicians: a collection of white workwear jackets, embellished with these abstracted emblems.