PROJECT EXHIBITION FILM ACT PUBLICATION EVENT

PINK FUGUE

Group Exhibition - Porous Grounds: Perspectives on Sand and its Social Role
KV Leipzig, Germany
8 November - 19 December, 2026

Pink Fugue captures the clamorous process of industrial glass-making through sound, color, and visual documentation. Visitors are invited to step inside a glass-production machine that never sleeps. Inescapable pink noise – layered sounds with more low-frequency components than white noise – and pink pigments emanating from glass and neon tube create an eerie soundscape, turning the ubiquitous material glass into an experiential matter. Pink Fugue explores how the nexus between extraction and industrial production can be experienced as a field of perception, expanding our emotional range and vocabulary for encounters with the more-than-human world. Here, “pink” is not merely a color, but a sensory manifestation of distributed yet targeted sound energy. It illuminates and taints visions of never-ending construction and economic growth. As an atmosphere, the Pink Fugue invites departure from established notions of energy bundled in glass and our relation to it, by engaging the senses to reposition ourselves to the spatial and social work of built environments.

Glass develops a polyphonic voice in Pink Fugue that beckons the audience to become immersed in diverse observations of glass-making that build on multi-sited research. Field-0’s field recordings and algorithmically generated sounds are distilled into the structure of a fugue, a polyphonic musical piece that interweaves multiple voices through counterpoint, imitation and repetition, while retaining the character of each. The sound arrangement in fact pays tribute to Johann Sebastian Bach, who spent much of his lifetime in Leipzig and is widely regarded as the pioneer of the fugue in music.

By using the front windows of the gallery as a medium of performance and knowledge mobilization the work engages both visitors inside the gallery and passers-by on the street, allowing them to hear and glimpse the being of glass. As such, they undo the typical exhibition space and turn glass, a tool of territorialization, into a more porous boundary. This glass is profoundly different from the 9,000 triangular glass panels forming the gridshell of Jewel Changi Airport in Singapore that inspired work on Pink Fugue. While these panels are engineered to transmit abundant natural daylight to sustain indoor plants, they also keep out heat, noise, and radiation. They are instrumental in producing the airport as non-place, a consumption-oriented mobility hub that is strictly separated from a dangerous and polluting outside world.

LINKS

RELATED PROJECT
Tracing Sand

CREDITS

Curators:
Daniel Ellwanger and Lukas Ley

Cooperations:
Max Planck Institute, S.AND Research Group: Lukas Ley, Teresa Cremer, Javed Kaisar, Tarini Monga

Participating artists :
Simone Albers
Lara Almarcegui
field-0 [Jingru (Cyan) Cheng & Chen Zhan]
Jeewi Lee & Phillip C. Reiner

Visual Documentation: Chen Zhan

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Pink Fugue is commissioned by Kunstverein Leipzig for Porous Grounds in partnership with S.AND.

field-0 research supported by Harvard GSD’s Wheelwright Prize and the Canadian Centre for Architecture

Sound design in collaboration with Shuoxin Tan

The exhibition is funded by Cultural Office of the City of Leipzig, Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony, Mondriaan Fund, and German Research Foundation

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