PHASE VIII – A Gesture for Listening

To make a monument or sculpture, that can be sincere to the phenomena of listening – to make a room able to foster and host this sincerity. To create a gesture for listening as a way of listening.

We would like to invite you to an attempt – to an installation that first will transform a living room (The Living Room as a White Cube for Listening), and later be an outside reinstallation of an unburned clay sculpture awaiting its dissolving.

Program:

13th – 17.00-21.00: Exhibition opening

18th – 16.00-21.00: Scheduled opening

20th – 15.00-17.00: Reinstallation of sculpture to Assistens Cemetery (we meet at the exhibition)

 

Phase VIII,2 – Reinstallation at Assistens Cemetery

 

Phase VIII,3 – Some traces of the exhibition

 

The exhibition address is: Odinsgade 2, 1. th. 2200, Copenhagen, and is furthermore also open by appointment.

+45 40212007

bureauforlistening@gmail.com.

A Gesture for Listening – Phase VIII – will happen in two steps.

First the Living Room as a White Cube for Listening will be activated as an exhibition room for a comprehensive but gentle installation of the sculpture Before the Ear, in Front of the Sun. As a visitor you will enter a  merged space of familiar elements bound to the room. Elements from a living room (such as being able to sit down and drink tea at a table), the white cube (the fact that the walls, the ceiling and furniture is either white or covered with white sheets) and the soil, the dirt and clay, of which the sculpture is made (the floor will be covered by dark soft soil for planting).

Later the sculpture will be taken to Assistens Cemetery for its final (re)installation. Here it will dissolve as time passes due to the rain and the dew that will loosen the form of the unburned clay. The sculpture will disappear. Its material return to the ground.

We ask you, firstly to meet the sculpture in a living room – to enter, barefooted and relaxed as being in a home. And later, to go by the ‘memorial’ for listening slowly dissolving itself at the cemetery.

 

 

By doing the re-installation of the sculpture to the cemetery we wish to create a moment, a gesture, both in time and space, where listening can unfold and manifest itself, and yet move on; to transform and continue as listening. Think of it as a search for a changeable sculpture and installation – potentially sincere to our concept of listening. The cemetery is for many people in the neighbourhood conceived as a place related to their experiences and practices of listening. We hope with this re-installation to honor and support this place.

This exhibition has collaboratively been put into form by Emilie Tarp Østengård and Lund Lund (Bureau for Listening).

 

The artwork is made by Emilie Tarp Østensgård.

Working largely in the sculptural field, Østensgårds work often stem from the notion of signs and language; how we are born in a nonverbal, sensuous body but live most of life in a linguistic representation of the world. Through her images she wishes to challenge the daily narratives being lived out through language as well as its existing form and inherent logic. The work “Before the Ear, in Front of the Sun” likewise examines potential encounters outside speech and writing.

 

Before the Ear, in Front of the Sun, 2022

Unburned clay, pastels, ink

55 x 35 x 9 cm

 

A Gesture for Listening [Room installation]

Soil for flower planting, black plastic sheets, tea (served for guests), hand towels, a bowl with water

 

The dissolving of the sculpture will be documented.

Elements to consider:

The warm, dry smell of soil

The sunlight, always changing

The softness of the soil, the crispness of white sheets

The contrasts between the white wall, the dark soil, and the colorful ear

The idea of a home, of a living room, of a white cube

The idea of a gesture for listening – and then, consider the actual gesture, you being in the room, you listening, we following the birds circling

 

How we whisper to each other – why do we whisper?

How we sit in silence, listening to the clay of the ear, and imagine the brushes which for some time ago added the colors

A memory of burial memorial, a body covered by a white sheet, later by the soil

Consider in what way one’s or our listening change due to the soil, to have bare feet, to be together, to be together with an enlarged painted ear

How is this an image – an image on what?

What happens when we exit the room? When we back to be alone – when we continue to be together?

The clay, the colors, the gathering – all a gesture, but for who and how?

Consider the patience, the caring, the wondering and searching

Consider being outside, in the sun

Consider a lost memory, consider a place for these memories, a place for listening´

Consider walking around, in the living room, around the ear, consider walking with someone

Nightly (poor photo quality) documentation of the installation’s drappings, light, contrasts and atmosphere.