For “Infra Voice” the artist worked with infrasound, with frequencies below approximately 20 Hertz, so low that they are barely discernible to the human ear. A number of species of animal communicate using these tones, including giraffes. Our image of elegant giants striding gracefully across the savannah is no doubt affected by the fact that the animals appear mute to us. With “Infra Voice” Kahrs gives them a voice, and not via the transposition of their sounds and noises into the audible range, but instead through music.

The fact that human perception in the infrasound range has come up against its limits does not mean that people have not attempted to venture into this sphere. In 1850 the violin maker Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume invented the octobass, the largest stringed instrument ever constructed, expanding the options for compositions in the bass range. An octobass weighs well over one hundred kilograms and measures nearly four metres. It is played like a double bass, though the strings are not plucked but rather pressed with bows that are operated using handles and foot pedals. The instrument failed to establish itself, but a number of them still exist, together with replicas. Kahrs developed her video installation from the strange correlation between giraffe communication and the curious string instrument.

Taking stock of the dimensions of her protagonists, she confronted the giraffes at the Hagenbeck zoo in Hamburg with a composition for octobass specially written by the Norwegian Guro Skumsnes Moe. On the basis of simple analogies – size, form, sound – in the spatial installation of three upright format canvases a complex interaction develops from the visual connections, the micro-perspectives when touching instrument and animal and the passing of time over the course of a day, until the twilight of the giraffes.