What is music doing in an art museum? That’s one of the questions co-curator Sachiko Namba uses to open the exhibition Ryuichi Sakamoto | seeing sound, hearing time, the first major European retrospective of the Japanese artist and composer. It opens tonight (10.09.) in the Rieckhallen at Hamburger Bahnhof.
Somewhere between environmentalism and activism, film, performance, electronic music and pop, it’s hard to pin down exactly what defined Sakamoto. He first gained international recognition in the late ’70s as co-founder of Yellow Magic Orchestra in Tokyo. The group fused electronic music, synthesizer technology and digital production methods long before “ambient” and “techno” became household terms. From the mid-2000s onward, he began installing music in space. Music, Sakamoto once said, is an art form that exists only in time. Working with sound as a spatial and visual medium increasingly moved to the center of his practice. He developed three-dimensional sound spaces, working closely with artists and filmmakers along the way.
His installations grapple with perception, time, nature, technology and impermanence. Collaboration was a fundamental principle underlying his art. Chief among his collaborators is likely alva noto, or Carsten Nicolai, with whom he co-produced the score for “The Revenant” (2015) and several albums, and with whom he shared a close friendship. Nicolai has now designed a room for the exhibition, three and a half years after Sakamoto’s death, presenting two film projects underscored by tracks from Sakamoto’s final album “12”. Five large, black-papered installation rooms were created for the show in total, all marked by the master’s unmistakable textures, scratches and sounds.
You could spend days in this exhibition and lose all sense of time altogether, or perhaps, more accurately, live through every state of time there is and lose yourself within it. How does music alter our perception of time? How does it create spaces where different temporal planes can coexist? Where do environment and art converge within it? And what responsibility do we carry? These are the big questions Sakamoto grapples with, and ones we’re confronted with the moment we step into the exhibition. But amid all these questions, keep it simple, Sachiko Namba concludes in her introduction. Her advice: “Just enjoy the show.”
Text: Inga Krumme / Credits: Ryuichi Sakamoto “seeing sound, hearing time”, Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, 11.09.2026 – 20.06.2027, shown works: async-immersion, 2023, TIME, TIME, 2024, Ryuichi Sakamoto + Shiro Takatani & IS YOUR TIME, 2017/24, Ryuichi Sakamoto with Shiro Takatani © The Estate of Ryuichi Sakamoto / KAB Inc.
Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Invalidenstr.50, 10557 Berlin–Mitte; map
Ryuichi Sakamoto “seeing sound, hearing time” 11.09.2026 – 20.06.2027
@hamburger_bahnhof
