About
Oliver Baurhenn is a Berlin-based curator, cultural manager, and radio producer working at the intersection of experimental music, sound art, and contemporary culture. From 2000 to 2024 he was artistic co-director and managing director of CTM – Festival for Adventurous Music and Art, shaping one of Europe’s leading platforms for experimental sound and media practices.
Extended Profile
From 2000 to 2024, Baurhenn served as artistic co-director and managing director of CTM – Festival for Adventurous Music and Art, one of Europe’s leading festivals for experimental music and media culture. Together with his co-directors, he developed CTM from a small independent initiative into an internationally recognised cultural platform, with an annual budget exceeding €2 million, audiences of up to 40,000 visitors, and a permanent team of ten.
During this period, he developed transdisciplinary programmes connecting music, visual art, performance, and critical discourse, and established long-term collaborations with institutions including Kunstraum Kreuzberg, HAU – Hebbel am Ufer, the Goethe-Institut, and Berghain. He also founded and directed DISK – Initiative Bild & Ton e.V., the organisational body behind the festival.
Alongside his work with CTM, Baurhenn initiated and led several European cooperation projects in experimental music and sound art, including SHAPE+, SoCCoS – Sound of Culture / Culture of Sound, and ECAS – European Cities of Advanced Sound. From 2010 to 2022, he chaired the international network ICAS – International Cities of Advanced Sound, connecting festivals and institutions dedicated to experimental sound practices worldwide.
His curatorial work includes exhibitions, commissions, residencies, and interdisciplinary projects developed in collaboration with museums and cultural institutions across Europe. He co-founded the Berlin project space General Public and was previously involved in the Dutch-German gallery Kunstruimte-Berlin. In 2001, he worked as a curatorial collaborator at the 2nd Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art under Saskia Bos.
Baurhenn is also a long-standing radio producer and moderator. From 2010 to 2024, he co-produced parts of the series Zeit-Ton extended for ORF Ö1, the Austrian public broadcaster, featuring composers and performers such as Éliane Radigue, Rebecca Saunders, Hildur Guðnadóttir, and Werner Dafeldecker. Since 2009, he has produced CTM Radio on the Berlin community station reboot.fm.
His writing addresses questions of cultural production, diversity, and politics. He is the co-author, with Ibrahim Quraishi, of Cultural Apartheid in Germany (forthcoming 2027), co-editor of Gendertronics – der Körper in der Elektronischen Musik (Edition Suhrkamp, 2005) and The Knot: An Experiment on Collaborative Art in Urban Public Space (Jovis Verlag, 2011), and has published essays in taz and CounterPunch, among others.
From 2013 to 2025, Baurhenn served as a member and later speaker of the Berlin Council for the Arts, contributing to debates on cultural funding, Berlin’s cultural policy, and the working conditions of artists and other stakeholders. Between 2022 and 2025, he was a board member of the German Music Fund (Musikfonds e.V.).
Today, Baurhenn works as a freelance grant writer and project developer, supporting festivals and cultural organisations in securing and managing European funding. Since April 2026, he has also served as EU Grant Manager at the Association of European Jewish Museums (AEJM).
Curatorial Approach
Baurhenn’s curatorial practice is grounded in the conviction that sound is not only an artistic medium but also a mode of thinking about space, collectivity, technology, and social experience.
Across exhibitions, performances, and festival formats, his projects bring together artists working in music, visual art, performance, and research. These constellations often move across disciplinary boundaries and create spaces in which unexpected encounters between artistic practices, audiences, and ideas can emerge.
A recurring focus of his work is the relationship between experimental artistic practice and broader cultural and political questions: how music and sound art engage with issues of diversity, postcolonial critique, gender, and digital transformation. This reflects not only a programmatic interest but a long-standing commitment to building institutions and platforms that are structurally open, internationally connected, and critically reflective.
His curatorial work moves between independent artistic scenes and institutional frameworks, between local contexts and global exchange, seeking to create conditions in which artistic experimentation and cultural dialogue can flourish beyond the constraints of the market and the mainstream.