Hotel Marienbad 008: Jacob Kirkegaard. House of Mare

Hotel Marienbad 008
Jacob Kirkegaard. House of Mare
18.03.2010, 7 pm

In Norse mythology, “mares” or “albs” are small black goblins that, at nighttime, slip into houses through keyholes and sit down on the sleepers tearing their hair and inducing nightmares. In English the word “mare” both stands for this evil nightly spirit as well as for a female horse.

With the new work House of Mare, the Danish sound and media artist Jacob Kirkegaard presents a foray into one of the most common and most fascinating phenomena of unintentionally produced human sounds: the noises we make while we sleep. The artist invited 16 guests to individually spend one of 16 subsequent nights in the suite of Hotel Marienbad. During their sleep, he captured the sounds they made – movements, snoring, murmurs or sleeptalking – adding them to the sounds made by the previous guests. The result is a multi-layered composition that invites its listeners to experience an acoustic dream-memory of the hotel room.

Jacob Kirkegaard explores the hidden and unexpected aspects of (natural) sounds through installations, performances and compositions based on artistic and scientific methods. Born in Copenhagen in 1975, Kirkegaard received his MFA in 2006 after having studied at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany under the supervision of Siegfried Zielinski and Anthony Moore. Kirkegaard has presented his works worldwide in the context of exhibitions, festivals and conferences such as club transmediale Berlin, the James Cohan Gallery and Diapason in New York as well as the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark. His latest CD releases are Forget to breathe (in collaboration with Lydia Lunch) at Contemporanea, 2009, and Labyrinthitis at Touch, 2008. Kirkegaard lives and works in Berlin.

Supported by the Friends of KW Institute for Contemporary Art.