Antechamber, 2024 Exhibition Review
During a trip to Berlin last year, I saw this sound-based installation Antechamber, 2025 by Jessica Ekomane. I’ve been thinking about this piece a lot lately due to the immersive quality of the work despite its’ minimalist design. The artist used speakers and amplifiers placed strategically around the room to create an environment of embodied listening. You could explore the piece in any way you liked, but the artist still held this level of control. If you decided to walk around the space, interacting with each speaker individually, you would garner a different experience of the piece than if you chose to sit and listen on the benches. At times, the sound would move around the room from speaker to speaker, and at others the whole room would fill with sound for you to bask inside. The sound wasn’t looped but instead created by an AI software that the artist designed to create a never-ending, and never repeating, soundscape.
This installation has resurfaced as an inspiration to me as of late due to its use of space and sound installation. I wish to create a piece that encourages the viewer to explore the installation and hopefully interact with the work in a similar way. I’ve been considering the use of various speakers, positioned alike, that the viewer can move to experience the sounds. These sounds would be a mixture of ambient melodies/drones and spoken word, both in a poetic sense and a jarring blocky way.
As of late, I have been considering an interactive element to the piece. Instead of the sound being on at all times/timed by my choice in a sort of linear narrative loop, I’d like to maybe have it so that if the viewer interacted with a light or a sculpture or a scripture, the sounds would appear, telling the story in a nonlinear way which would be me more fitting I think for the feelings I wish to express. For example, when the viewer interacts with the lavender, possibly just y touch but maybe by planting a singular stem, the sound that would emanate could be that of pain or relief. Or if the viewer was to stand under a light, it could play something orchestral and soothing or start speaking a story of feeling under the light/the bright lights of a surgical unit.
This channel of thinking may not directly build upon the more socially engaged, collaborative aspects of my art practice, but it does help me to be thinking about curatorial choices and ways of displaying work, particularly sound based work.
