Cevdet Erek: Americas

Cevdet Erek’s practice engages with sound as a sculptural form, bringing together multiple registers of history with music composition and spatial experience. Trained as an architect and sound engineer, and active as a musician, he assembles installations that reconfigure how a visitor perceives space—tuning into the material qualities of architecture and the social, historical, and geographical conditions they occupy. Americas arranges five of Erek’s site-responsive sonic works, developed over the last decade for projects in Mexico City, Chicago, San Francisco, São Paulo, and the US Embassy in The Hague, alongside a new commission for SculptureCenter.

Erek’s site-specific practice operates across various registers. When working at a distance, he borrows locals’ “eyes, ears, minds, and experiences,” like in Measures Taken (2026). Erek scored this work with samples of a Mexico City-based percussionist striking the acoustic panels of its original exhibition space. chiçi ny (2026) revisits an installation where everyday materials (like the steel fences on view here) attach to a building’s interior and serve as the basis for an accompanying composition. Erek has also distributed sound across a building’s extant structure, sing its rooms or windows as a timing framework, as in Ꜵccident Grotesque (2025). Recent works like Thrash softly from afar (2019) consider his relationship with thrash metal, a musical genre that influenced his youth in Istanbul, in light of local contexts. Here he expands on this connection with Sound/Artwork (2026), a new commission that mixes 1980s New York metal with audio samples of works included in Sound/Art (1984), a landmark SculptureCenter exhibition that helped to establish sound art as a genre.

Erek’s sonic installations are carefully tuned to their physical environment yet remain translatable, variable, and expandable, like an original track that can be bootlegged, reproduced, and reconfigured. Reworking the murmurs of his previous installations, all of which hold traces of their origins in the Americas, Erek develops a rhythmic structure regrounded in New York, weaving a single, newly distributed sonic environment.

Cevdet Erek: Americas is curated by Jovanna Venegas, Curator.

Cevdet Erek (Istanbul, 1974; lives and works in Istanbul) studied architecture at Mimar Sinan University for Fine Arts and Sound Engineering & Design at Istanbul Technical University’s Center for Advanced Studies in Music (MIAM). He was an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam (2005–2006). Erek is co-founder of the experimental band Nekropsi. He has participated in major international exhibitions, including dOCUMENTA (13) (Kassel, 2012); the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), representing Türkiye; The Liverpool Biennial (2025) and The São Paulo Biennial (2025). His work has also been presented at numerous institutions, such as MUAC (Mexico City, 2017), M HKA (Antwerp, 2018), the Art Institute of Chicago (2019), Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin, 2019, 2024-) and Secession Vienna (2025). Erek is professor at Istanbul Technical University, TMDK and ITU MIAM in Istanbul.