Doors open: 19:30
Event start: 20:00
The ticket includes access to the exhibition area
Camille Norment has created a new composition for nine voices and the glass armonica, which uses handheld speakers and feedback loops to create a mesmerizing performance of movement and sound. Vocalists from the Oslo 14 ensemble begin in the museum’s Lobby and move up to the Festsal. As they negotiate the spaces carrying speakers emitting their own voice, they create and engage with feedback and distortion.
The title of the new work is Scattered Round – Songs for Elliptical Voices. A “song” typically implies a finite, repeatable vocalized sound object that expresses concrete and easily graspable content. “Elliptical speech” on the other hand is evasive, obscure, and fleeting. It refuses to be held and pinned down. The feedback loop itself is an elliptical voice. In rings and rounds, each performer doubles their own voice with a roving speaker and feedback, performing with a second self in an act of both manipulation and control, as well as agency and release.
This alters the psychological/acoustic space of the body, the museum, and the circular bank of audience members. “Enacting the paradox of feedback as both alarm and promise, the voice’s embrace of a body is both concrete and physical while also emancipatory in abstraction”, writes Camille Norment.
Camille Norment (born in the USA) is an Oslo-based multimedia artist. She represented Norway at the Venice Biennale in 2015, and her work has been shown at art institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Art, MoMA New York and the DIA Foundation. In 2023, she was simultaneously the Festival Exhibition artist at Bergen Kunsthall with a solo exhibition, and premiered a commissioned 13-instrument composition work at the Bergen Festspillene music festival – the first time an artist has done both. Camille Norment is the proud recipient of the Nam June Paik Award 2023.
The work is made with support from the U.S. Embassy in Oslo.
Photo: Herman Dreyer
