The Schering Stiftung organizes a lecture evening as part of the exhibition “Small Survey on Nothingness” by Christoph Keller with former Federal Minister of State for Culture and Media, Prof. Dr. Christina Weiss on “Emptiness, Silence,  ‘Nothingness’ in Works of Art”.

Modern art discovered the interstices, the spaces between language, sound, image, and performance. It is in the gap between the signs, in the silence, in the omission that the creative energy of a work of art unfolds for the recipient who reveals him or herself by being stimulated to respond subjectively to words, colors, lines, tones or sounds. In a work of art, the empty spaces are iridescent openings that allow for joyful discovery rather than yawning gaps that are tangible reminders of loss. Nowhere is more through less celebrated more intensely than in the arts, in whose “modern” department—from Malevich to conceptual art, from Mallarmé to experimental poetry, from Cage to Lachenmann—a likeness, a story, a melody is merely a peripheral phenomenon.