In the late 1960s, the German artist Irma Hünerfauth (1907–1998) abandoned painting in favor of a new set of aural experiments. By the early ’70s, Hünerfauth had begun to make a series of boxes filled with metal and plastic waste that toyed with the symbiotic relationship between the human and the mechanical. The artist, then in her early sixties, had been inspired by a welding course. She created her first boxes under her own name, before adopting the pseudonym IRMAanipulations.
Staggeringly, “Speaking Boxes” is Hünerfauth’s first solo exhibition since her death. It features two variants of her containers, which the artist produced from the beginning of the ’70s up until the early ’90s: Vibrationsobjekte (Vibration Objects) and Sprechende Kästen (Speaking Boxes). These objects recall miniature dystopian landscapes, with trembling wires soldered to circuit boards, pieces of sheet metal, and plastic flowers that evoke nightmarish fish tanks. The works are indebted as much to the feedback loop of cybernetics (defined by Norbert Wiener in 1948 as the systems of control and communication shared by man and machine) as to a fascination with the impact of new technology upon the production of art and society.
Hünerfauth’s Vibrationsobjekte are brought to life with the press of a button, while the Sprechende Kästen feature theatrical recordings of the artist singing or reciting poetry. Together, these kinetic assemblages speak to the crises of pollution and loneliness, industrialization and war, of the second half of the twentieth century, but they feel eerily prescient in their anticipation of the cybernetic systems that are now part of the fabric of our society.
— Alice Godwin