VIENNA.- Some of Cevdet Erek’s site-specific installations and sonic environments, placed at the intersection of sound, sculpture, and architecture, evolve around the idea of ‘sound ornamentation’. With this term, the artist refers to Adolf Loos’s Ornament and Crime (1908) amongst others. This text celebrates lack of ornamentation as the mark of a ‘cultivated’ society. Loos’ polemic is key to a moralising discourse that once sought to purge architecture of decoration in the name of progress. In that context, ornament – associated with sensuality, femininity, and excess – was condemned as wasteful and irrational. Loos’ text linked ornament to primitivism and degeneration, framing modern Western culture as superior to the supposedly ‘undeveloped’. Such rhetoric not only marginalised the close relationship between ornament and abstraction but also exposed the colonial and patriarchal logics underpinning modernist aesthetics.

Erek re-enters this ideological terrain, transforming ornamentation from decorative surface into temporal, vibratory structure – one that organises space and perception. In his installations sound is not background but architecture itself – something built, inhabited, and experienced by bodies in motion. Here, ornamentation becomes a verb: it describes the act of tuning, of aligning oneself with surrounding frequencies. Through attention, the visitor becomes part of the composition. In this way, Erek’s installations dissolve the boundaries between composer and listener, architecture and inhabitant.

For this exhibition, Erek ‘ornamentates’ the façade of the Secession. Loudspeakers are mounted in a symmetrical pattern on the outer walls of the building. They accentuate the iconic architecture not only visually but also acoustically, turning the façade into a surface that can be heard. The continuous loops of rhythmic patterns both reveal and reconfigure the building’s geometry. By referencing devices of orientation and accessibility such as sound boxes placed at traffic lights for sight impaired people, Erek also draws attention to the politics of perception – how space is organised through systems of guidance, control, and care.By placing the letters ‘L’ and ‘R’ on the building’s façade – commonly read as signifiers for ‘left’ and ‘right’ – Erek stages a further play on symmetry: between the dual channels of stereophonic sound, the bilateral nature of hearing in humans and many animals, the monumental façades of classical architectures, and the ideological divides that structure the abstract political spectrum.

This work is part of a larger body of negotiations with local architectures and social histories – from Sharjah to Marrakech to Çanakkale to Baden-Baden. And it is also a return to Vienna. After all, the starting point of this long-term exploration was the artist’s commissioned installation Sky Ornamentation with Three Sounding Dots and Anti-Pigeon Net (2010), created for the courtyard of the Baroque Palais Erdödy-Fürstenberg, the former home of TBA21, as part of the project Tactics of Invisibility, with further exhibitions at Tanas (Berlin) and Arter (Istanbul).

In the gallery on the first floor, the Grafisches Kabinett, touch plays a crucial role in experiencing Erek’s work. The wood reliefs are designed to be felt by hand. They are modelled after the Braille symbols on the sound boxes at the pedestrian crossings outside the Secession, which assist visually impaired people in navigating their surroundings. Again, questions of bodily situatedness lie at the heart of Erek’s installation.

In each project, Erek listened before he built. The acoustic conditions, the circulation of air, the textures of materials, and the habitual movements of bodies all become compositional parameters. In his works, the heightened awareness of how sound and space are entangled not only with surrounding architectures or natural spaces, but also histories of power, and placement.

While paving important ways for modernist architecture, Loos’s rejection of ornament reinforced hierarchies of culture, gender, and sensibility. Erek’s sonic architectures, are porous and inclusive, producing conditions for multiple temporalities and listening positions to coexist. Erek’s works draw the visitor’s full body into the experience of a shared architecture. In his projects, space becomes a resonant body, continuously activated by the movements of those within it. Rhythm acts as both spatial and social principle, shaping collective experience – one grounded not in purity or control but in resonance, relation, and togetherness.

Cevdet Erek was born 1974 in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1974 and lives in Istanbul.

Curated by Bettina Spörr