Symphony

Lundahl & Seitl

Responding to the curatorial vision of its host, this artwork turns its gaze inwards to take place in the visitor’s consciousness, existing in parallel with the space it inhabits.

Visitors are given headphones and follow perceptual cues: instructions and suggestions that enhance the space around them. Whiteout goggles prompt visitors to access their own archive of lived physical experience. These deeper layers of personal memory are brought to the surface where they merge with recent impressions of concepts and features signified in Lunds konsthall.

Symphony is an exploration of embodied memory that activates several layers of meaning and different forms of seeing all at once. It is a learning machine that absorbs and reconstitutes its own past, reciting the lessons of that past each time it is physically refashioned, and every time it begins again.

This composite artwork has accumulated in a series of over ten major commissions in museums worldwide. This autumn it will travel to Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India, Centre Pompidou-Metz, France and Martin-Gropius-Bau, Germany.

Christer Lundahl and Martina Seitl formed Lundahl & Seitl in 2003 — a trans-disciplinary artistic collaboration that focuses on making the viewer's perception the central medium of the work. Each project is specific to a particular place and situation, while also investigating history, time, space and human perception. Recent developments include projects for smartphones involving large groups of the public, in an interplay between physical and virtual space and between traditional and social media.

Concept: Christer Lundahl & Martina Seitl
Assistant Director: Rachel Alexander