ATELIER NORD

On now

• In Wonderful, Marvelous, the audience is invited into a room filled with the sound of a floating female voice and sonic feedback. One senses fragments of recognizable melodies from songs that envelop the World War II era. The music is overtly of love, desire, and sometimes serene optimism. At the same time, the songs are encrypted with politics and disillusion and a gaze towards empowerment. A generative soundscape of song and sonic feedback The ethereal song floats in slow swirls around the exhibition space. Here it morphs into resonant sonic feedback produced by discrete microphones which capture the disembodied voices. Recognizable melody is abstracted into simple chords. These slowly reveal notes that hint at the melody while keeping it just out of grasp. The ambience is alive in its waves, swells, and bitter-sweet tonal words that tease the thresholds of beauty and pain, empowered by dissonant feedback. Visitors move around within this generative soundscape, inevitably affecting the acoustic response, while caught in the seductive tensions of song and feedback. Desire, unfulfillment, and power as historical parallels to the present Camille Norment has had a longstanding fascination with the myth of the Cumaean Sibyl, which serves as a narrative backdrop for the work. Wooed by a god, the Sibyl was granted eternal life. But when denying his sexual desires, she was denied eternal youth. Thus over generations, she shriveled smaller and smaller until she was placed in a jar, where she continued to wither until nothing was left but her voice. When this woman, one of the greatest of all prophetesses, was asked what she wanted, she only wanted an end to the wish she was granted. In Wonderful, Marvelous, it is not the purpose to retell the myth. Rather, it serves as a narrative that prompts historical connections to the tensions of the present. Today’s global instabilities mirror swirling historical cycles in which power feigns desire and false fulfilment, ultimately to destruction. About the artist Camille Norment (b. 1970, Maryland, USA) exhibits and performs internationally over a span of 30 years. Her practice thinks conceptually through sound and its cognitive and somatic relationship to bodies, environments, and histories. The artwork manifests in forms including installation, composition, sculpture, drawing and performance. Norment has several permanent public artworks, and appears in many public and private collections. Solo exhibitions include Dia: Chelsea, Dia Art Foundation, New York; Bergen Kunsthall; and The Venice Biennale, amongst others. Composition commissions include the Borealis Experimental Music Festival, Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival, The Munch Museum, and The Armory, New York.
  Description

  Camille Norment / Wonderful, Marvelous

  Until 29 Nov 2026

  
  More info