TONSPUR FOR UKRAINE
_{PAUL WALLFISCH: THE TUNNEL OF LOVE}

16.06. – 06.09.2025
TONSPUR_passage | Free entry
Opening: So 15.06., 17h

8-channel soundwork, 7-part series of A1 images

My first night in Lviv, the window rattling air-raid sirens brutally woke me at 4:38. I rushed out to the street, expecting to find a bomb shelter by following the crowd. After a few minutes of unsettled panic, I finally came across another person and asked her in traveler’s English: “Air raid warning! People don’t go to shelter?” To which she answered, “No, people don’t go. People sleep. If bomb come, we die.”

I was on my way to Ukraine’s Tunnel of Love, intending to bring a little bit of it back to Vienna’s tunnel of sound, the TONSPUR, a sonically curated passage leading into the Museum’s Quartier from the west. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, Georg Weckwerth has incorporated solidarity with Ukraine into his curatorial mission. Commissioning the creation of the June 2025 TONSPUR, he explained that as an American he thought I might bring a different perspective to the current tragedy.

For my soundtrack I found train tracks; trumpets, pipe organs and church bells. Singers and streetcars, music boxes and gin bars; soldiers on crutches climbing into Teslas and a Taxi driver who told me Selenskyj should be “drawn and quartered,” as my google translate put it.

Near Rivne, the Nazi headquarters of Reichskommissariat Ukraine, I walked for miles through the Tunnel of Love. In January the leaves were all off the trees, so the tunnel became more of an imagined possibility. But no less magnificent.

Our sight is based on actually seeing a small amount of what is visible. Our hearing depends on little more than ten percent of sonic structure to comprehend what we’re listening to. Paying attention to the ekphrastic nature of existence; actually simply paying attention, is the only source of meaning. Because there’s really no meaning except as infused by the arc of time. Which exists only by paying attention. And then the soundtrack becomes music. And then, as my friend Dan Kaufman has written, another name for music might be love. – Paul Wallfisch

Paul Wallfisch, born in Basel, Switzerland in 1964, lives and works in New York City, United States of America.