Opening: Saturday, 20 December 2025, 12:00
The lost and often forgotten ideas surrounding the art of sound and musical technology in early 20th-century Avant-garde in the Soviet Union are being highlighted in the exhibition, while some of the key figures of the period and their groundbreaking areas of research are also presented. Among them is Arseny Avraamov, who proposed new conceptual and technological ways of understanding sound as an artistic material and invented the technique of Ornamental Sound; and Leon Theremin, who pioneered new electronic approaches to music, developing countless projects aimed at combining sound with color, gesture, scent, and touch.
Visitors to the exhibition have the chance to play the theremin, the first electronic musical instrument that could be performed without any physical contact; to dance on the terpsitone, a platform where movements of the body are translated into corresponding tones; and to listen to light and to the electromagnetic field.
Animated films with artificial soundtracks from the 1930s created using graphic-sound techniques, as well as music synthesized with Evgeny Sholpo’s variophone, an optical synthesizer that utilized sound waves cut onto cardboard disks, which were rotating synchronously with a movie film, also give to the space new perspectives.
The materials and reconstructions in the exhibition come from the archive and studio of Andrey Smirnov. Several works of art from the Costakis collection of MOMus are also included. Andrey Smirnov is a physicist, interdisciplinary artist, independent curator, collector, writer. He is the founder of the Theremin Center and the author, among others, of the monograph 'Sound In Z: Experiments In Sound and Electronic Music in Early 20th Century Russia' (Walther Koenig & Sound and Music, London, 2013). Since 2023, Andrey Smirnov has been living in Thessaloniki, where he founded 3ERKALO (Mirror), a space for contemporary electroacoustic music and sound–performing arts. He also collaborates with MOMus-Museum of Modern Art-Costakis Collection as the specialist responsible for the operation of the Experimental Sound Laboratory.
Curated by Andrey Smirnov
Coordination: Maria Tsantsanoglou, Artistic Director of MOMus-Museum of Modern Art-Costakis Collection
The exhibition runs in parallel with the music workshop “Composing sound paintings”, led by Zesses Seglias and Andrey Smirnov, with support from the 2025 Funding for Youth Projects / Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation.
