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Secession PodcastAuthor: Vienna Secession
Secession Podcast is a digital series created by the Secession in 2022. In conversations with artists, curators, and theorists, the podcast series offers interesting insights into the Secessions exhibition programme of twelve to fifteen contemporary art shows every year. The program also features discussions on current issues, as well as experimental sound formats and creating an oral history archive conversations between members of the Association of Visual Artists, who share their personal recollections and reflect on the 125-year history of this unique artist-run institution. Language: en Genres: Arts, Visual Arts Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Artists: Cevdet Erek in conversation with Bettina Spörr
Episode 78
Friday, 20 February, 2026
Shortly before the opening on 28 November 2026, Cevdet Erek talks with curator Bettina Spörr about his exhibition and sound installation on Secession's façade. Cevdet Erek Secessions-Ornamentik 29.11.2025 – 22.2.2026 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. More Cevdet Erek was born in Istanbul in 1974, where he lives and works. He has developed site-specific installations and presented his work extensively in solo and group exhibitions, among others at Museumsquartier, Vienna; Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Art Institute of Chicago; M HKA – Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp; MUAC Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; Pavilion of Turkey, 57th Venice Biennale; Spike Island, Bristol; Kunsthalle Basel, Basel; Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool; 36th Bienal de São Paulo (both 2025); Manifesta 14, Pristina (2022); Gropius Bau, Berlin; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt am Main; 5th Marrakech Biennale (2014); Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Sharjah Biennial 11 (2013); 9th Gwangju Biennale (2012); CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel (2012); 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011); Tate Modern, London. Since 2008, Bettina Spörr is a curator at the Secession, where she engages in close collaboration with artists to conceptualise and realise exhibitions that explore the profound impact of contemporary art on society. Throughout her career, she has worked with numerous artists on solo exhibitions and, in 2010, curated the group show where do we go from here? at the Secession. Secession Podcast: Artists features artists exhibiting at the Secession. The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast. Programmed by the board of the Secession. Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed (2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard Audio Editor: Paul Macheck Executive Producer: Bettina Spörr
