Sophie Bélair Clément’s artistic oeuvre is concerned with conditions in the field of museum presentation, the materials that are created for documentary purposes in this context, and the deviations that result from efforts at reconstruction. Bélair Clément’s context-related performances and installations, which she develops in cooperation with other creative artists, mainly with musicians, draw lasting attention to our direct but also our mediated experience of space.

The work of Bélair Clément is grounded in (performative) experience and its “mise en récit”, its implementation in a narration. For her Berlin work she combines her experience of an architectonic space (the Neue Nationalgalerie) with her meetings and exchanges with the museum personnel (the staff told the artist their favourite songs or singers and bands) and a sound recording (the technical combination of the corresponding soundtracks and their new orchestration by Canadian composer and musician Mark Molnar).

The spatial realisation in the Künstlerhaus comprises several elements: on the one hand, there is the title as well as a text by the artist as a pointer to her real experience, a ground plan – adapted to the narration – of the Neue Nationalgalerie, which now lists the staff’s musical preferences set in various positions in place of the artworks, and a short sound piece in which the favourite singers or pieces of music cited by the staff are overlapped and re-orchestrated. A referential pointer to the original is given by a wall with vertical blinds recollecting the ground floor of the Neue Nationalgalerie, and by original seating designed by Mies van der Rohe.