Kunstmuseet i Tønder, Museum Sønderjylland
2021
A solo exhibition by the sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard, who records the places we think of as silent: the ice cap in Greenland, the wall between Mexico and the United States, the wild boar fence on the Danish-German border, and the human body after death. Six sound installations were designed and built for the halls of Kunstmuseet i Tønder, each a room of its own. MELT, forty minutes of melting ice in a white double-walled chamber with twelve hidden speakers, red light and haze. Animal and Membrane, video and sound on the two fences. And Opus Mors in four parts, morgue, autopsy, decomposition and cremation, each given its own space: curtained cylinders in green and red, and a blue chamber with a pool of water under an opening in the ceiling. Nothing to look at but colour and light. Everything to hear.
Design / technical production / installation
MELT is composed of recordings of different stages of ice melting, moving from the violent sounds of ice caps grinding against each other to trickling sequences and flows of water. It traces how water moves through its phases, from solid to liquid, changing the combination of molecules irrevocably. All sounds were recorded in Greenland by Kirkegaard in 2013 and 2015.
Animal combines the sound of the so-called wild boar fence with video of stuffed wild boars. The recordings of the fence were made with vibration sensors placed on its surfaces in strong wind. The fence is a 70 km metal barrier erected by the Danish state in 2019 on the otherwise invisible border between Denmark and Germany.
Membrane is a sound and visual portrait of the growing border wall between Mexico and the United States. Kirkegaard travelled along the wall from El Paso to Tijuana, shooting video and recording the ambient sound of the landscape on both sides, as well as the inner sound of the metal itself, captured with vibration sensors attached directly to the wall. With its panoramic vistas and close views, Membrane reveals that this seemingly silent stretch of the American Southwest is alive with light, shadow and above all sound: the sound of the wall.
Four listening spaces for one of the natural aspects of being alive, which is death. The work portrays four sound environments the human body will commonly be exposed to after death, events no one gets to sense on their own body: a morgue, an autopsy, a cremation and the decomposition. An immersive, intimate and detailed sonic meditation into the four spaces of death.
Opus Autopsia: near-field recordings of a full autopsy, from opening the body to closing and washing it, each organ with its own sonic timbre. Opus Putesco: recordings from a forensic facility where donated bodies decompose in an enclosed area of nature, made with measurement microphones one centimetre above and vibration sensors inside. Opus Morturarium: ambient recordings from two morgues, the deep tones of the machinery that keeps the bodies cold. Opus Crematio: the coffin rolled into the oven, the stages of the burning, the ashes cooled, crushed and poured into the urn.
The blue chamber. A circular room with a pool of water in the floor under an opening in the ceiling, and the deep tones of two morgues in the walls.
PhotoJacob Kirkegaard
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