Harm van den Berg
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Invisibility of Colour
(2024)Sound installationFor Invisibility of Colour I asked hundreds of people which colours they found beautiful or interesting. I recorded their responses and transformed them into sound samples. This collection of spoken colours is played through 24 invisible loudspeakers arranged in a grid behind a large white canvas, spreading across its surface in clusters. The sounds move slowly or rapidly, form temporary connections, and disappear again. Rather than a pre-composed musical piece, the work functions as a sound painting that is constantly changing and always in the process of becoming.
I developed the sound installation in 2022 with the support of a development grant from the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts (AFK). The Invisibility of Colour was presented twice as a solo exhibition in 2023. For each presentation, I adapted the installation to the architecture of the exhibition space. At puntWG, the work took the form of a freestanding square panel measuring 3 × 3 metres with a depth of 5 cm. At Gallery SANAA in Utrecht, it was presented as a wall-filling canvas measuring 5 × 2.5 metres with a depth of 5 cm.
Listen to an audio excerpt: