Join Bureau for Listening as they open up new pathways into the museum’s sound archive in A Space for Listening. With selected parts of the sound archive, we explore how we can preserve and care for sound as an art form that disappears and changes as it unfolds, and how listening itself can become a way of keeping the archive alive.

The listening session will be guided by Lukas Quist Lund from Bureau for Listening and museum director and curator Christian Skovbjerg Jensen, and will combine deep listening with conversation.

Bureau for Listening (2021–) is an artist and research collective exploring listening as a critical, empathetic and artistic practice. Working nomadically and across disciplines, the collective seeks to engage others in shared practices and projects. Together with the museum, they have developed A Space for Listening, which explores and presents selected parts of the Museum of Contemporary Art Roskilde’s sound archive. Rather than approaching the archive chronologically or through an art-historical lens, we explore it through the act of listening.

Accessibility: The event takes place in the tower room at the gasworks, accessed via a steep staircase. The event is therefore not recommended for people with mobility difficulties.

About the exhibition

The Sound of focuses on the poetic, political and social potentials of sound in contemporary art, presenting works by an array of international and Danish artists including Hajra Waheed, Hanne Lippard, Clara Mosconi, Julian Abraham ‘Togar’, Emeka Ogboh, Cally Spooner, Francesco Fonassis, Arendse Krabbe and Annika Kahrs.

Through voices, rhythms, language and vibrations, the exhibition opens experiences that move between the intimate and the collective, between body and space, between listening and action. The exhibition presents several newly produced works together with a programme of performances, talks and activities. Explore the programme here.

The exhibition has been created in collaboration with Moderna Museet Malmö.

The exhibition is supported by:

Danish Arts Foundation, The Augustinus Foundation, New Carlsberg Foundation, Knud Højgaards Fond, OCA, Italian Council, Det Obelske Familiefond, Sound Environment Center (Lund University), Art Music Denmark, Danish Composers’ Society, Den Hielmstierne-Rosencroneske Stiftelse, Ernst B Sund Fonden

A speciel thanks to: Roskilde Municipality, To Øl, AIAIAI, Mellemfolkelig Samvirke/ActionAid Denmark, Politiken Plus