Reflections on the gallery as an ideological chamber, like those of Brian O’Doherty, can still be seen instructive. In The Gallery as a Gesture he observes that “history obligingly curves into an echo chamber”: the white cube, seemingly neutral, amplifies and recirculates meaning until the gesture of an artist becomes louder and more resonant in retrospect than in its initial moment. The gallery is not a passive container but an institutional framework that structures perception, transforming emptiness into a medium saturated with ideology.

Echo Chamber takes this premise and extends it beyond the visual into sound and water, forces that refuse containment. They reverberate, cross thresholds, and register histories in fragile yet insistent ways. If O’Doherty exposed the gallery’s power to delimit and to turn gestures into echoes of itself, the works here show how reverberation unsettles such limits. No echo comes back the same; each return is marked by the forces that have borne it.

Echo chamber takes shape through three practices. Haryung Lee’s installations treat water as a mnemonic medium. Liquid preserves and erodes simultaneously; it shifts state and surface, storing traces even as it dissolves them. In Lee’s work, water becomes an active agent of history. Lou Masduraud’s sculptural interventions pierce the gallery walls, opening apertures and thresholds that reveal the governing architecture itself. They show how access and perception are controlled, yet also how such controls can be breached. Through these openings, boundaries prove porous, refracting not only Lee’s liquid installations but the institutional space itself. Sebastian Eduardo brings sound into the space: a looping polyphony of styles that resists singular authorship. Functioning as the soundtrack for his drawings, it binds the exhibition’s elements, while simultaneously destabilizing them.

In political discourse, an “echo chamber” implies enclosure and repetition. O’Doherty pointed instead to the echo chamber of art history, where gestures are transformed over time and amplified beyond their origin. Here the exhibition space becomes a room of resonance: water erodes, sound distorts, architecture refracts. Echoes do not repeat; they displace and unsettle. Echo Chamber positions resonance as a critical force, rejecting the closure of the white cube and the stasis of repetition. Echo becomes a principle of proliferation, multiplying perspectives and exposing the fragile structures that seek to contain them. To attend to echoes is to confront unstable memory, permeable boundaries, and the transformative potential of every return.

Text by Eleonora Bitterli

Curated by Body Archive
Supported Pro Helvetia