Upcoming： Christian Marclay｜LISTENING

Christian Marclay’s new series of collages places the act of listening at its centre. Listening — to music and to sound more broadly — has long shaped his practice, dissolving the boundary between sound and image so that they operate within a single perceptual field.
Collage remains fundamental to Marclay’s methodology. Across video, sound, and works on paper, he samples and splices fragments of popular culture — music recordings, film stills, manga, comics, magazine imagery — much like a DJ. Through strategies of concealment, cropping, and reframing, he activates the viewer’s imagination, allowing absence to become generative rather than void.
As in his video works 48 War Movies (2019) and Subtitled (2019), the Concentric Listening series unfolds through processes of extraction and recomposition. Instead of presenting complete faces sourced from magazines, Marclay removes their features, preserving only the outer contours of the head, including the protruding ears. The centre is hollowed out. What remains are outlines — vacant shells layered one within another. The faces nest concentrically, like a target or rippling water, forming radiating rings.
In Eccentric Listening, the compositions open into a more spatial dynamic. Each ear retains its individuality — as distinct as a fingerprint — even as it participates in a collective structure.

A related strategy of framing and partial revelation appears in Oculi (Listening Trio) (2026), part of Marclay’s new collage series based on vintage record covers and sleeves. Here the central circular cutouts of the sleeves — originally designed to display the record label — become compositional apertures. Through these openings, fragments of LP cover imagery emerge, while concealing the larger image.
Listening thus becomes both image and idea. It is not a singular, linear act but a layered and cumulative process. Perception radiates outward in expanding circles, moving from the solitary body toward a shared field of resonance.
The ear itself mirrors collage: a conduit between external sound and internal interpretation, between private experience and public space. In these works, collage is not merely a technique of assembly but a metaphor for listening itself — fragments circulating, overlapping, and reverberating.

Christian Marclay was born in 1955 in California, USA, and grew up in Geneva, Switzerland. He studied at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and the Cooper Union in New York. In 1979, he began performing with records and turntables used as musical instruments, emerging as a pioneering figure in experimental music. Since the 1980s, alongside improvisational performances, he has continued to create works that explore the relationship between sound and image across a range of media, including video, photography, sculpture, painting, and printmaking.
Marclay has exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at Kunsthaus, Zurich (1997); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2002); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2010); Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2010); Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Switzerland (2015); Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (2019), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2019); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2022). He was awarded the Golden Lion at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011 for The Clock (2010). In Japan, he presented the solo exhibition “Christian Marclay Translating” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. Marclay has performed and recorded with numerous musicians, including John Zorn, Elliott Sharp, Sonic Youth, Fred Frith, Steve Beresford, Okkyung Lee, and Otomo Yoshihide.