New sound experience on the third floor

If you come to KØS often, you will notice that you will be greeted by a new sight and, not least, sound when go to the museum’s third floor. Normally, Bjørn Nørgaard’s colorful cartons for the Queen’s tapestries hang under the rounded ceiling, but now the sensuous and poetic sound work of the American visual artist Victoria Keddie fills the dimly lit room.

The sound work, which is entitled Sensory Feedback and is part of KØS’s current exhibition Realistic Utopias, is an auditory description of the historic Antioch Art Building, which was built at Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio, USA by the radical artist collective Ant Farm in 1972. A building that has been closed to the public for years and has recently been given landmark status. Ant Farm’s Antioch Art Building was a utopian educational project whose purpose was to create sensory learning. In 2020, the artist group Art Building Creative Preservation Initiative [FAFAAB], of which Victoria Keddie is a part, was established to preserve the building, it’s ethos and pioneering approach to teaching. An initiative that for Victoria Keddie i.a. has spawned this work, which aims to preserve the building through recordings of its soundscape.

As you move around the third floor, you will be able to sense the historic Art Building, it’s structure from the air shafts to the foundation and as the temperature and humidity of the room change, the movements of the sound will as well. The work invites the audience to experience the unique structure via sound and connect to Keddie’s experience of this unique building, which is many thousands of kilometers away.

Realistic Utopias is on display until June 11 2023. Read more about Realistic Utopias here.

Photo: Julie Nymann