Oliver Beer Resonance Project: The Cave

Oliver Beer transforms Kiasma’s top floor into a prehistoric, resonant cave.

Lullabies, traditional songs, and voodoo melodies intertwine in this major installation at Kiasma, bringing to life the atmosphere and acoustics of a prehistoric cave. The immersive video opera is filmed in Font-de-Gaume, an archaeologically significant cave in southwestern France renowned for its hundreds of prehistoric paintings.

The Cave brings together eight singers from across the globe. Musicians Rufus Wainwright, Woodkid, eee gee, Mélissa Laveaux, Hamed Sinno, Jean-Christophe Brizard, Mo’Ju, and Michiko Takahashi were each invited to perform the earliest song they could remember from childhood. Each singer performs in tune with the cave’s harmonics, their voices naturally amplified by the cave and weaving together in the gallery space into a haunting polyphony meticulously recomposed by Beer.

The installation comprises 16 audio channels and eight monumental video projections arranged throughout the exhibition space. Together, the singers’ voices resonate across the gallery, evoking the experience of a cave that only a handful of people will ever have the chance to visit.

Oliver Beer’s practice fuses music with visual art. Since 2007, he has been developing his Resonance Project—a series of works exploring the relationship between voice, architecture, and inherited memory. Previous iterations have taken place in sites including the Ottoman baths of Istanbul and the emblematic glass-clad tubular walkways of the Centre Pompidou. The Cave marks a major evolution in the series.