MALMO.- Beginning in the late 1960s, Catherine Christer Hennix (1948–2023) developed a singular, interdisciplinary practice that placed sound at its center. Best known for her long-duration compositions, she integrated music, mathematics, philosophy, language, and visual forms in work that exceeds the bounds of any single medium, unfolding instead as an integrated inquiry into structure, perception, and knowledge itself.

Born in Stockholm, Hennix was immersed from an early age in the city’s experimental music and art scenes. While she performed as a jazz drummer, she studied biology and linguistics before turning to philosophy and mathematical logic. As one of the initial members of Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), she created text-sound compositions alongside more wellknown figures like Åke Hodell and Sten Hanson. In 1968, she traveled to New York, where encounters with John Cage, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, and Walter De Maria deepened her interest in the downtown art scene. Meetings with La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Henry Flynt, and, later, Pandit Pran Nath influenced Hennix’s engagement with non-Western tuning systems, extended duration, and the spiritual dimensions of sound.

Throughout the 1970s, Hennix split her time between Stockholm and New York. Working fluidly across media, she produced sound compositions, poetry, theoretical writings, abstract Nō dramas, paintings, and sculptural installations. Her landmark 1976 exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Toposes and Adjoints, which has now been partially recreated at Malmö Konsthall, brought her manifold interests into a unified spatial form, combining steel sculptures, soot paintings, light-based works, mathematical diagrams, and a sinewave composition.

From the late 1970s through the ’80s, Hennix taught mathematics and computer science at SUNY New Paltz and lectured at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. During this period, she remained engaged in informal, interdisciplinary contexts such as the Rhinebeck Institute—a loose network of poets, thinkers, and artists—while playing drums with various musicians. Hennix transitioned in the mid-80s, and began iterating upon a series of visual works, in vivid red and blue palettes, that reference the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. His writings on knot theory, topology, and sexual difference became increasingly central to her artmaking over the next decade.

After a long hiatus, Hennix returned to sound composition in 2003 with Soliton(e) Star—a computer-generated “infinity composition” that functioned both as a constant sonic presence in her studio and as the foundational tone for her work with the newly formed ensemble Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage. Building on an introduction to Sufism by Pran Nath, she integrated the devotional dimensions of Islam into her work with both sound and poetry. She spent her later years in Istanbul, deepening her study of Arabic maqam—a system of melodic modes—and drawing clear parallels between her spirituality and her lifelong engagement with philosophy and mathematics. Reflecting on her practice, she wrote, “Like gravity, sounds and writings (when we think of them as meaningful), warp the universe around us.”

This exhibition brings together works spanning Hennix’s entire career and is accompanied by a series of live performances by collaborators and artists influenced by her work. Together, these elements offer a rare and comprehensive view of a practice that rigorously and poetically pushed the limits of how art, sound, and thought might converge.

The exhibition is a collaboration between Malmö Konsthall, Blank Forms (New York) and Empty Gallery (Hong Kong/Berlin).

Curatorial team: Lawrence Kumpf, Mats Stjernstedt, Anna Kindvall, and Benjamin McIntosh.