#16 Paul Elliman
How we learn the old songs, 2017
Paul Elliman, How we learn the old songs, 2017, Audio installation, sung by Charmian Bedford and Lucy Page, Installation view at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Courtesy the artist
British artist Paul Elliman (born 1961 in London) has consistently engaged with the production and performance of language as a material component of the socially constructed environment. In a world where objects and people are equally subject to the force fields of mass production, Elliman explores the range of human expression as a kind of typography.
In conjunction with his solo exhibition As you said at KW in spring 2017, Elliman produced a new KW commission in form of an audio installation, which can be heard daily at 1 and 5 pm at the courtyard of the building. In How we learn the old songs (2017) two opera singers, sopranos Charmian Bedford and Lucy Page, rehearsing Johann Sebastian Bach’s Sicut locutus est, are interrupted by a passing ambulance and immediately adopt the sound of its siren as a possible extension of Bach’s work.
Paul Elliman’s audio installation could be heard from March 2017 until Mai 2018.