NYAB Event - Harm van den Berg "Lullaby Land"

Harm van den Berg "Lullaby Land"

AC Institute

This event has ended.

For the installation Lullaby Land artist Harm van den Berg asked people from all over the world to sing a lullaby they remember from their childhood. He recorded these songs and merged them together into a sound collage. The sound piece is presented through a customized radio so it appears as if the songs - invisibly floating in the air like radio waves - are received by a world receiver. Between each lullaby you hear noises like a radio searching. Most of the songs will be incomprehensible, but the universal message of these songs surpasses language.

The second part of the installation consists of a painting of a sky at night with stars and a full moon: an image everyone knows from childhood. In reality everybody looks at the same sky with the same stars, but all from different points of view - topographical and cultural - so the same sky looks different to everyone. To stress this, Harm van den Berg broke the painting in several parts and put them in line with each other. The cracks and tears between the parts reminded the artists of noise waves, analogous to sounds a radio makes when it's in between two radio stations. He likes the idea that the collage is presented in a long sheared strip. People who walk along the painting scan the pieces just like a radio searcher.

A sense of “place” is central in Harm van den Berg’s work. Using different media (painting, sculpture, sound, video) and crossing boundaries between them, Van den Berg portrays landscapes in which the spectator can enter and lose herself or himself.