OSLO.- Over the course of history, our cities have been shaped by disease, by war, by migration, by weather, by trauma, and the twenty-first century is no different. Curated by Eva González-Sancho Bodero and Per Gunnar Eeg-Tverbakk,
osloBIENNALEN FIRST EDITION 2019–2024 has set out, through a five-year programme, to explore the unusual contexts and questions deriving from art in public space.
With all of us now living in socially distanced self-isolation and taking into consideration official guidance related to Covid-19, the biennial programme continues to investigate the subtle and myriad ways in which people encounter art in public space and the public sphere. The spring programme will start with an exploration of sound environments with works by Norwegian artists Alexander Rishaug and Øystein Wyller Odden.
The curators note: “With the current situation, we are experiencing a sort of paradox; while national borders are closed or restricted, people are reaching out to one another around the globe via the internet. This reminds us that public space supersedes physical space, and also emphasises that a city like Oslo, and the art produced and disseminated here, can enter into conversations with audiences all over the world. Several art institutions are embracing these possibilities in interesting ways, with guided tours in exhibitions streamed online, videos of artworks accompanied by stories and knowledge, live artists talks, and more. For the first edition of osloBIENNALEN, it has always been essential to find a way to work with platforms other than the physical public space of the city, and from this reflection, to begin work on the setting up of production units that allow us at a later stage to produce radio, film, television, together with internet, mail art, among others. The sound works by Alexander Rishaug and Øystein Wyller Odden have a quality that lends itself to direct experience, and, interestingly, were recorded in buildings that represent political power in Norway: the offices of Oslo’s power (City Hall) and the former offices of the prime minister and government (H-blokka).”
Y (59 ° 54'54.76 ″ N 10 ° 44′46.03 ″ Ø)
What does a building sound like after a terrorist attack? This is what Norwegian artist Alexander Rishaug explores in his sound recordings captured in different spaces in H-Blokka, a building targeted by the car-bomb that tore through Oslo’s government quarter on 22 July 2011, killing eight people. The coordinates in the title refer to the geographical position of its adjoining highrise, Y-blokka, which is scheduled for demolition. Since 2011, Y-Blokka and H-Blokka sit empty, a poignant reminder of the city’s collective trauma. The destruction caused by these terrible explosions was devastating and what fills these buildings now is a silence that surpasses its spatial dimensions, a silence that speaks of a before and an after.
Described by literary scholar Tore Stavlund as a “psychoacoustic landscape in the empty Høyblokka as it stands today, tottering above the Government Quarter—a monumental memorial to the persistence and perhaps also helplessness of the bureaucracy” (a description that also resonates with contemporary political criticism), Y (59 ° 54'54.76 ″ N 10 ° 44′46.03 ″ Ø) was recorded over the course of two nights in October 2017 and creates a sonic portrait of the abandoned building’s current state of haunted emptiness, irrevocably connected to the past. Rishaug’s audio artworks capture both memory and place. Through acoustics, resonance, frequencies, vibrations and sub/ultrasounds that are not typically audible to the human ear, the artist reveals how absence is evoked by the sound of silence, a reminder of both earlier human activity and how it ceased.
Stavlund: “Rishaug is part of a tradition of audio art with its origins in the works of the Canadian composer and audio theorist R. Murray Schafer, whose 1977 book Our Sonic Environment and The Soundscape. The Tuning of the World is a central work in the ecophilosophical tradition of making recordings of audio environments. It was necessary, Schafer thought, to preserve authentic sound environments, both urban and rural, and thus contribute to a wider understanding of how sound environments evolve over time. A relevant example in this context is the Spanish audio artist and ecologist Francisco Lopez’ recordings from the World Trade Centre in New York, made in February and March 2001, that is, not long before the terror attack in September, in which recordings from machine rooms, elevator shafts and ventilation systems form the raw material for a sonic portrait of the buildings—not that the recordings were meant to be an authentic representation. Lopez categorically rejects the idea that a sound recording is just a representation of its source, and argues that it is an independent creative act with an autonomous result… We can say the same about the concrete results of Rishaug’s work with Y (59° 54’ 54.76” N 10° 44’ 46.03” E )... All the tracks open with silence before a gentle white noise is allowed to grow, becoming louder and louder until it has achieved an all-encompassing presence, which then fades out again.”
Y (59 ° 54'54.76 ″ N 10 ° 44′46.03 ″ Ø) will be released as a vinyl LP with a suite of eight tracks, each lasting exactly eight minutes and accompanied by a booklet with photos from H-Blokka and a text by Rishaug. The booklet and LP will be distributed by Motto. The project was carried out in collaboration with Hagelund / Christensen and with the support of KORO / URO. The release will coincide with a special online launch, hosted by osloBIENNALEN FIRST EDITION 2019–2024, which will take place on May 25, marking the anniversary of the biennial’s first public launch.
Compositions for Oslo City Hall
Øystein Wyller Odden’s work addresses the relationship between technology, architecture and people, investigating and exposing their underlying structures. These two pieces were conceived for the first edition of osloBIENNALEN and performed in Oslo City Hall, home to the annual award ceremony of the Nobel Peace Prize, as well as immense frescoes by Alf Rolfsen and Henrik Sørensen’s enormous painting. A controversial space—“No building divides the city more”—it is, as described by Norwegian critic and writer Arve Rød, a space that is at once “monumental and ostentatious… sombre and unapproachable… truly a cathedral dedicated to profane forces.”
Power Line Hum (Composition for the Organ in Oslo City Hall) takes as starting point the history of the pipe organ in Oslo City Hall. When the building was raised, the elaborate pipe organ that was originally planned was deemed too expensive and was replaced by a Hammond organ. However, the pipes remained as decoration, a “silent facade,” and, for Power Line Hum (Composition for the Organ in Oslo City Hall), several were made functional by the organ builders Ryde & Berg. A wind system was installed to give air to the pipes and the Hammond organ was refurbished. The work contains the sound of these two organs, the previously silent and its electronic replacement, each playing the same chord. It was played over the course of several months in Oslo City Hall and reproduced the low humming bass sound made by electricity at a frequency of 50 Hz. This low hum, with the resonances and harmonics it creates in the fuse box, has been transcribed by the artist for reproduction on the organ.
Rød: “Wyller Odden selected five organ pipes which had been damaged and restored by experts in the Netherlands. These have been put back in their original place in the City Hall, and made playable by being connected to a simple wind system. The idea is then to let the pipes play together with the instrument which back in time replaced them—that is, the Hammond organ—in a musical transcription of the sound of the electrical power in the hall, and to let the composition build on the difference between the two sounds. How the composition is performed in purely technical and physical terms is not as interesting as the fact that the result, a drone or so-called ‘bourdon’—an unchanging note that can play below a melody, as on the bagpipes or the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle—is an expanse of sound that is just as suggestive and marked by mysticism as it is minimal and static in expression.”
The reproduced hum of the current is the sound of modern society and enters into a dialogue with the social-realist art of previous eras presented in the City Hall.
Kraftbalanse [Power Balance] (Composition for Piano, Alternating Current and Orchestra) was co-composed with Jan Martin Smørdal, and performed twice over the course of the biennial in Oslo City Hall. In this monumental space, a dramatic soundscape of a grand piano and a string orchestra responded to fluctuations in current frequency, creating a portrait of power distribution, both of the transmission of electrical power to the country by Statnett, Norway’s state-owned company responsible for the power grid, and, ultimately, the income of the City of Oslo.
Video and audio material from Øystein Wyller Odden’s sound compositions, Kraftbalanse and Power Line Hum, will be broadcast online in May. Power Line Hum will be accessible online from 5–10 May, while Kraftbalanse will premiere online on 12 May, and will play every day until 16 May. Each will be accompanied by a series of special online events, including a live-streamed conversation with the artist and curators.
