OLIVER BEER

The A Thousand Voices project will start with a sound and drawing collection phase that will take place in two studios designed by Oliver Beer in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection rooms from October 2024 to January 2025. This rich material will be made up of drawings and sound recordings created by the young participants. Oliver Beer has chosen four works from MAM’s collections (Victor Brauner, Nina Childress, Sonia Delaunay and Georges Rouault) that will be reinterpreted in four films directed by the artist at the end of the project. Music, as the common thread running through the artist’s work, guided the selection of these masterpieces from the museum. Every child – whether accompanied by their class (from the end of nursery school to the last year of high school) or visiting individually – will be invited to reinterpret and take ownership of one of the museum’s four works, through a drawing exercise. The drawings from the workshop will then be assembled and printed on film, at 12 frames per second, to create four animated films. Similarly, the sounds recorded by the children will form the main material for a new immersive composition that will accompany the films. All the children, their schools, and all MAM’s visitors will be able to discover these films at the exhibition organised at the museum in spring 2025.

Oliver Beer trained in musical composition before attending the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, and studying cinematic theory at the Sorbonne, Paris. This musical background is reflected in his live performances, films, installations, paintings and sculptures, which reveal the hidden acoustic properties of bodies and architectural environments. The artist’s familial relationships often inform multi-disciplinary works that engage with intimate yet universal concerns, such as the sounds and memories contained within personal possessions. Beer explores the unifying potential of music that resonates across history, generations and cultures, as embodied in objects and spaces. Oliver Beer’s work has been presented at the Met Breuer and MoMA PS1 in New York; Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE in London; Centre Pompidou, the Opéra Garnier, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Palais de Tokyo and Palace of Versailles in Paris; the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon; the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art in Australia; the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham; WIELS in Brussels; the West Bund Museum in Shanghai; and the biennials of Sydney, Istanbul and Venice. He participated in British Art Show 9 and has held residencies at Palais de Tokyo, the Watermill Centre, the Sydney Opera House, and Fondation d’entreprise Hermès. In 2024, his work is being showcased in France as part of the Normandie Impressionniste festival and the 17th edition of Lyon Biennale.