SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Soundtracks is the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s first large-scale group exhibition centered on the role of sound in contemporary art. Focusing on the perceptual experience of space, the exhibition offers opportunities for discovering public architectural features and galleries throughout the newly expanded building. Spanning sculpture, audio and video installation and performance pieces made since 2000, the show takes its point of departure from key works in the media arts collection. The presentation highlights past SFMOMA commissions by such artists as Brian Eno and Bill Fontana, as well as new and diverse work from over 20 contemporary artists, including Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Camille Norment, O Grivo and Amalia Pica, among others. Soundtracks is accompanied by a map and an online catalogue.

“Sound can be perceived as an unruly presence, a noisy disturbance, or its opposite, a luring call to follow its frequency to a different place,” said Rudolf Frieling, curator of media arts at SFMOMA. “This distributed exhibition suggests a path through the building for visitors, offering a sensory experience of our new spaces,” added Tanya Zimbardo, assistant curator of media arts.

Select pieces address the association of “soundtracks” with film scores in unexpected ways, while others take various approaches to visualizing the relationship between sound and space. Susan Philipsz’s Night and Fog (Clarinet) (2016) deconstructs an existing soundtrack by Hanns Eisler for Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) (1956), a documentary about Holocaust concentration camps by Alain Resnais. In this piece—which has been adapted for SFMOMA and is accompanied by a series of photographs of the artist’s breath—12 speakers emit different tones played by a clarinet, based on when the wind instrument appears in the score. Ragnar Kjartansson’s video installation The Visitors (2012) explores architectural space as well as the space between people. Eight musicians, each recorded alone in a different room within a mansion, collaborate in a performance of the same song. In Christina Kubisch’s sound sculpture Cloud (2011), a tangle of red wiring uses electromagnetic induction to make electrical fields audible to visitors through specially-designed headphones.

Soundtracks is co-curated by Rudolf Frieling, curator of media arts, and Tanya Zimbardo, assistant curator of media arts.