Peter Vogel Retrospective Exhibition
14 October - 4 November 2011
College of Arts and Humanities, Gallery

Curators: Jean Martin and Conall Gleeson

A retrospective exhibition of the pioneering sound artist Peter Vogel took place at the University of Brighton, College of Arts and Humanities and was the first exhibition of Vogel’s sound sculptures in the UK. His  sculptures are activated by the movement, gestures and sound emanating from audiences as they enter the space.

This retrospective brings together a significant number of Vogel’s works including the two most important and innovative large-scale works, the Sound Wall (6 x 0.5 meters) and the Shadow Orchestra  (8 x 8 meters). These will form the core of the exhibition that will also include eighteen smaller sound and light kinetic sculptures. Vogel’s interactive sound sculptures demonstrate a breakdown of the boundaries across practices within fine art and performance traditions. His work questions established relationships between sculpture and sound, seeing and hearing, the static and the live, as well as challenging the place of sound within the historiography of gallery spaces. The exhibition is designed to celebrate and examine the work of Vogel as pioneering, influential and as anticipating the emergence of more recent interactive art and sound art practices.

Accompanying the exhibition will be a DVD documentary, featuring interviews and discussions that explore Vogel’s work in the context of contemporary sound art practices with the artist and writer David Toop; the Berlin based Professor Helga de la Motte who established sound art as an academic research field in Germany and Matthias Osterwold, curator of the Sonambiente Festival 1996 in Berlin, and who is now artistic director of the Maerz Music Festival in Berlin.