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Oliver Beer
입을 위한 작곡 (어머니가 가르쳐준 노래들) I & II Composition for Mouths (Songs My Mother Taught Me) I & II | 2018 | 8’18” (4’10” & 4’5”)
Courtesy of the artist and Thaddaeus Ropac gallery
Courtesy of the artist and Thaddaeus Ropac gallery
Synopsis
Created during Oliver Beer’s residency at the Sydney Opera House for the 21st Sydney Biennale, Composition for Mouths (Songs My Mother Taught Me) I & II (2018) explores the relationship between voice, memory, and resonance. Beer invited singers to recall the earliest songs they remembered from childhood—inherited melodies passed through generations—and reshaped these fragments into new compositions. The film shows pairs of performers pressing their lips together to form a shared acoustic chamber. Through this intimate technique, the singers activate the resonant frequencies of each other’s faces, producing subtle microtonal vibrations known as “beats”. Breath and proximity become compositional forces, turning the human body into both instrument and architecture. In the first part, a tenor’s memory of an Indigenous song learned from his aunts merges with another singer’s childhood hymn, Two Little Eyes to Look to God. In the second, two sopranos bring together an Indian classical raga and a melody by the eleventh-century composer Hildegard of Bingen, creating a dialogue that spans cultures and centuries. Presented in Scene IV: Air Between Us, the work contemplates the shared atmosphere that connects all living bodies, its vibrations carrying traces of our collective memory and meaning.
About the artist
Oliver Beer is a British visual artist and composer whose work explores the relationship between sound, space, and form. Working across film, performance, installation, and painting, he treats sound as a primary material, transforming an invisible energy into visual and spatial experience. His practice often begins with careful listening to the acoustic qualities of objects and environments, uncovering how architecture, vessels, and the human body resonate with distinct harmonic frequencies. Through filmed performances and installations, Beer demonstrates how a sustained note at the right pitch can activate space, setting walls, sewers, caves, mouths, vases—any empty vessel—into vibration. The human voice becomes a generative force, revealing the hidden musical properties embedded within physical forms and inviting viewers to reconsider how sound shapes perception. Beer's work has been presented internationally at institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA PS1, New York; Centre Pompidou and Palais de Tokyo, Paris; London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE; WIELS, Brussels; and the Sydney, Istanbul, and Venice Biennales. He studied at the Academy of Contemporary Music, London, Ruskin School of Art, Oxford, and the Sorbonne, Paris.