Music and language, animals and people, communication and silence - these are the poles between which Annika Kahrs moves in her films, performances and installations. She often questions the possibilities and limits of understanding and possible approaches to the world and to others.
For Infra Voice, the artist focused on infrasound - those low frequencies below around 20 Hertz that are barely perceptible to the human ear. Some animal species communicate in this range, including giraffes. Our image of these elegant giants, who stride gracefully through the savannah with their long legs, is undoubtedly shaped by the fact that they appear mute to us. With Infra Voice, Kahrs gives them a voice - not by technically transmitting their sounds into the audible range, but through music.
The fact that human perception reaches its limits in the infrasonic range does not mean that we humans have not tried to tap into this range. To this end, the violin maker Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume invented the octobass in 1850 - the largest string instrument ever built, which extended the sound possibilities of music to extreme depths. An octobass measures almost four meters, weighs over a hundred kilograms and is played like a double bass, although it is not fingered but controlled by an ingenious system of levers and pedals. The instrument never caught on, but a few examples and replicas still exist today. Kahrs developed her video installation from this idiosyncratic connection between the silent communication of the giraffes and the colossal string instrument.
Taking up the dimensions of her two protagonists, she confronts the giraffes of Hamburg's Hagenbeck Zoo with music specially composed for the octobass by Norwegian composer Guro Skumsnes Moe. Based on simple analogies - size, shape, sound - a multi-layered play of perspectives unfolds in the spatial installation of three portrait-format canvases: an alternation of close-ups and visual relationships between animal and instrument, of time lapses and changes in light - right up to the silent "Giraffe Twilight".
November 15, 2025 to January 6, 2026
