If you had never encountered Hans Haacke’s work before, then you might think, upon entering the first room of this exhibition: “Oh nice, look! How pretty and interesting. There are his op art-influenced canvases of the early 1960s, and the physical and organic systems (balloons floating, plants growing) of later in the decade.” In the next space, you might think: “Holy moly! Something must have happened around 1969/70, that guy really had a moment of political awakening—look how fiercely he’s attacking the powerful in the art world.” At which point a Haacke expert might pop up and tell you that of course there is a peculiar, logically imperative connection between those earlier experiments in form, system, and process and the later work that would become the paradigmatic form, system, and process of institutional critique. This expert would have a point. But the desire to always explain that connection as a logically inevitable and linear one is also a bit suspicious and needs to be probed—for which this retrospective (which travels to Belvedere, Vienna) is a welcome occasion. The above thought experiment would not happen in actuality—before stepping foot in the first room, you have already encountered two later works—and so the …

A tremble, a silence, and a piercing clatter: “Sound of the Break” derives its name from a sequence in Elizabeth Price’s video installation A RESTORATION (2016), which displays what a voiceover calls “a great hectic gathering” of archival images of vessels from Oxford’s Pitt Rivers and Ashmolean museums. A disembodied choir argues that these objects are made to be broken, so that their echoes can resound. When a Boscobel Oak wineglass falls and breaks off-screen, the choir declares it “a small sacrifice” of which “the great rumble resonates.” A RESTORATION brings together many of Price’s recurring motifs: choirs of synthetically generated voices; archives absent from the historic record; interwoven technological histories; architectural plans as conceptual metaphors; sardonic institutional critiques; and untold feminist cosmologies. It is one of four works in her solo exhibition at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (the building, fittingly, is also home to a music school). Two dark spaces, each displaying two video works shown consecutively on loop, connect to a central viewing room in which four screens show new video lectures, made in 2020 during lockdown in London. Other works here include FELT TIP (2018), on how information technologies transformed the workplace; UNDERFOOT (2022), on the sonic …