Bernhard Gal and Yumi Kori create audio-architectural installations. Since 1997, they have explored the interactions between aural, temporal and spatial situations and their influence on human perception and imagination. Their installations have been exhibited internationally, in cities including Berlin, Tokyo, New York, Seattle, Basel and São Paulo.

Conceived in response to the distinct specificities of the ISE gallery, this installation transforms existing properties and characteristics to reveal an entirely new spatial experience. The exhibition’s title is shinkai – Japanese for “deep ocean” and the name of the world’s deepest diving manned submersible vessel. Central to Yumi Kori’s artistic and architectural practice is the transformative power of light. Incorporating only limited additional elements, Kori guides her viewers to a place where the invisible becomes visible and time and space collapse. With shinkai, Kori confronts the ISE gallery’s particular sense of finitude due mainly to its windowless, basement location. Her intervention evokes a dissolution of physical limitations, giving way to suggestions of what lies beyond the gallery walls. Bernhard Gal's sound installation serves as the appropriate acoustic complement of this situation. His composition for shinkai is partly based on existing sound sources recorded at the ISE gallery space. Sounds of rain drops are frozen into acoustic stills, drawing an acoustic image of being underwater where space and time are perceived in a different way.