every instant is at once is a project that brings together practitioners who work with sound, performance, theatre, literature, curating, theory and teaching to formulate proposals, fantasies, revisions, and forms of engagement that do not rely on an object-based logic and its detritus but shifts into one that is encounter-based.¹

The project is a call to a different type of attention—attention on moments ² , instants ³ , durations ⁴ . Attention not only payed onto something or given and taken but also being attentive to; to already-existing capacities, to look closely at needs, expectations, hang-ups, paradoxes, scenarios, traces, primers; to consider the conditions, challenges and potentialities of working with ephemeral and embodied practices in the school, the exhibition, the museum and the theatre; to ask, what infrastructural conditions are necessary to deal with practices on their own terms? What vocabularies, capacities and competencies should be developed to do so and which outdated models should be replaced? Aware of the paradox between transient works and the logic of the exhibition space and the museum practice of collecting and the tension that this produces, every instant is at once aims at opening up the dialogue about these conundrums and their potentialities.

Fleeting in taste. Feelings invoked by a drum solo. Attention to the moment. Where is the attention concentrated? Is the attention in the work or in upholding institutionality? Attention to the work responds and bends and builds infrastructures and vocabularies for listening. Attentiveness, attunement, and receptiveness call for infrastructural agility.

every instant is at once does not present works as answers to questions but rather makes public institutional typologies and ways of working, opening them up to discussion and including varying perspectives from the invited protagonists and their audiences.

The project begins discursively, running from 14 October until December 3, 2023 (opening on 13 October) and possibly leaving us with traces, followed by performative gestures and instants by a second set of protagonists from December 15 until January 30, 2024 (opening on 14 December). Curated by Kabelo Malatsie and Julia Künzi.

Program:

13 October, 6 – 9 p.m.
Performance by KITCHUAN, two texts by Ariane Koch and Matthew Hanson

2 November, 6 p.m.
Sonic lectures by Bill Dietz and Nina Emge with Tina Omayemi Reden






Bill Dietz, Mismatch Negativity Accretion, 2023
The sound piece is made up of 150-250 millisecond slivers of songs and sounds sent to me by visitors to the Kunsthalle, friends, social media followers. In total, I received 56 entries on 18 different days between October 13th and December 13th, 2023.
The texts bumping together are excerpts from:
- The Wikipedia entries for “Mismatch Negativity” and “Echoic Memory”
- CLR James, Grace Lee Boggs, and Cornelius Castoriadis’ 1958 book, “Facing Reality”
- 2 texts by Maryanne Amacher: her 1975 note on “Remainder,” and her early 80s, “Dynamic Range: the ‘Head Stretch’”
- A text by Diamanda Galas, her 1981, “Intravenal Song”
- A scientific paper on the speed of sound recognition DOMINIC W. MASSARO’s 1972, “PREPERCEPTUAL IMAGES, PROCESSING TIME, AND PERCEPTUAL UNITS IN AUDITORY PERCEPTION”
- First lines of the songs people shared with me
- And finally a paper from 1995 by Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji called “Implicit Social Cognition: Attitudes, Self-Esteem, and Stereotypes” which is frequently cited as an original point of recent managerial conversations about “unconscious bias”

17 November, 6 p.m.
Conversation with Nils Amadeus Lange & Yasmina Haddad (in German), talk by Hanne Lippard

3 December, 5 p.m.
Talk and discussion with Joel Valabrega and Rachel Mader

15 December 2023 – 28 January 2024
Performative and sonic gestures by Natalie Portman and Andrei Van Wyk
14 December: Opening, 6 – 9 p.m. with performance by Andrei Van Wyk at 6:30 p.m.

19 January 2024, 7 p.m.
Concert by Häusermann/Käppeli/Studer organised by Bureau Bollito

30 January 2024
Sister or He Buried the Body, Performance von Trajal Harrell
6.30 p.m. performance fully booked
8 p.m. performance fully booked

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¹ Exhibition-making by and large still uses an object-based logic even when the works are ephemeral or aural, it remains ocularcentric demanding a visual and durational encounter to satisfy the demand of showing. Time-based practices are predicated on the moment of encounter which is different to the viewing of objects during an exhibition period which is not an accumulation of moments or instants but rather a static encounter with an object that is stretched over time.
² Inspired by Mariah Carey’s formulation of living in the moment, taken after reading Amelia Groom’s text There’s No Beginning and There Is No End: Mariah Carey and the Refusal of Time.
³ Instead of instants as infinitely short spaces of time, or as points of time building linearly up onto each other, this project rather reads as a prolonged, stretched instant.
⁴ “Duration as dust cloud of instants, a group of points organised more or less coherently by a phenomenon of perspective”, as Gaston Bachelard formulated.

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