Oliver Beer resurrects the voice of an ancient cave in Helsinki
The British artist's immersive video opera transforms Kiasma's top floor into a resonant chamber where eight singers from across the globe perform their earliest musical memories, recorded within the 15,000-year old Font de Gaume cave in southwestern France.
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Inside the cavernous hall of Kiasma’s top floor, the gallery dissolves into something primordial. Eight monumental screens cast dancers of rust and ochre light across the polished concrete; the voices of eight singers, their songs culled from childhood memory, emerge from sixteen audio channels that transform the room itself into a living acoustic instrument. This is Oliver Beer’s vision: Resonance Project: The Cave, which opens this week as a work both archaeological and profoundly contemporary.
Beer was granted rare access to Font de Gaume, an exceptionally preserved cave in southwestern France where paintings created more than 15,000 years ago line the walls. The artist discovered something extraordinary whilst working within those ancient passages: the cave’s own resonance. Where prehistoric painters had concentrated their images, the stone amplified sound most powerfully. A low F note caused the cave to vibrate, amplifying the sound many times over.
He invited eight singers to this subterranean space, American Canadian singer songwriter Rufus Wainwright, French artist Woodkid, Canadian Haitian musician Mélissa Laveaux, alongside singers from Japan, Denmark, Lebanon and Australia, asking each to recall and sing their earliest musical memory. Lullabies, traditional songs, vodou melodies: fragments of human voice that echo across millennia. Beer then arranged these melodies, passed down through generations, into a new, multi layered vocal composition.
The installation that now occupies Kiasma does something rare in contemporary art: it makes the invisible audible and the ancient immediate. Visitors move through an enveloping darkness punctuated by the sculptural presence of those eight screens, the singers’ voices resolving and separating like light refracting through water. The work doesn’t merely document a cave; it conjures its presence, its breath, its capacity to hold human sound and fold it into stone.
Resonance Project: The Cave runs at Kiasma, Helsinki, from 6 November 2026 to 28 March 2027.
Imagery courtesy of Thaddaeus Ropac (@thaddaeusropac).
