Numinous Beginnings is a group show curated for times of isolation. This year, maybe we can see more clearly the empty spaces although we are quick to fill them.
Or rather, they fill quickly. We are told to avoid collective spaces, becoming hyper alert to our immediate environment. The lives of others inside their own four walls drift in and out of our own spaces; what was outside and other, seeps inside and becomes part of our lives.
For the lack of people in proximity to us we abstract the material sounds, finding beauty in our closeness to it and learn to love what we cannot escape.
Now we are surrounded by weather and time (the same word in French: temps) and many of the sound pieces we’ve received for this open call exhibition suggest a heightened affinity to and from within our surroundings. Many of the pieces are recorded and composed for your own headphones and phones for listening, some pieces are beautifully played out in our space or an urban sound walk, and some will happen in conversational real time and online.
The starting point is from the body, from the earth, through the weather and on the borders of spaces. In between endings and beginnings, we proposed that sound competes for space, attention, silence and isolation.
Yet how intimate all these sounds are, they attempt to fill spaces and share with us something private, to whisper in your ear. These works are about the ambient empty spaces, about closing the gap between me and you, here and there, or mine and yours.
Participating artists: Sandra Blichert, Mor Efrony, Emma Fuchs Sjövall, Anette Gellein, Vonrik Haug & Arnt Siwertsen, Constantin Katsiris, Peter Lenaerts, Anne Cecilie Lie, Magdaléna Manderlová, Ida Nerbø, Moumita Roy, Polly Stanton & Byron Dean and Elina Waage Mika
Curated by Amber Ablett and Julie Lillelien Porter.