Hummings: An Exhibition of Art in Public Domain in Køge

Hummings

Do stones feel sorrow? Do they hum?

They did in Hummings, the KØS exhibition that took over the city of Køge and its surrounding landscape in the summer of 2021.

Humming refers to a wide range of phenomena: from the noise produced by machines to the sound of gas oozing through the tectonic layers of the Earth or to the mating call of a male Midshipman fish in the ocean. Hummings offered us a chance to imagine a language connecting all beings, animate or inanimate.

Hummings was the pilot edition of a new international exhibition series of art in the public domain in Denmark. Juxtaposing fiction and poetry with the urban and rural geography of Køge, Hummings presented 17 art projects by national and international artists, writers, and thinkers. The exhibition included, reading sessions, talks, walks, performances, architectural and sculptural interventions, workshops, as well as video and sound works and installations by leading artists of art in the public domain.

The participating was: Jonathas de Andrade, Kerstin Bergendal, Rune Bosse, Ayşe Erkmen, Asunción Molinos Gordo, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Lea Guldditte Hestelund, Jakob Jakobsen, Maider López, Jumana Manna, Olga Ravn, Karin Sander, Christoph Schäfer, SUPERFLEX, Hale Tenger and Héctor Zamora.

Hummings was about plurality of voices; a metaphorical device to reflect on the possibility of voicing the invisible, silent, unpriviledged, repressed or vulnerable for a “Collaborative Survival” as the American anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing refers to it. It is a call to attend to what is happening unnoticed in front of our eyes, the unreckoned, the yet-to-be or in-between states of becoming, thus, to conceive and be liable for what is appearing on the horizon, though not visible nor legible, yet.

Indicating indistinctive sounds and expressions referring to a pre-language state, which we cannot define and understand clearly, humming can be considered a common thread between human beings and "other-than-human-persons”, thus, can serve as a beginning to think over the interspecies relationship.

Informed by recent research in microbiology and anthropology to social sciences and environmental studies, the exhibition seeks to cultivate an experience in the junction of these separate scientific fields and contemporary art. Hummings will be a site where fiction and reality, animate and inanimate, culture and nature, science and belief, past and future, advanced and regressed, self and the (absolute) other melt into one another and merge. Instead of a progressive understanding of time and the dominant knowledge-production regimes, the exhibition suggests suspending our usual understanding of the relationship between such dualities, and proposes an interwovenness with many possible worlds, focusing on contingencies and entanglements.

Furthermore, the exhibition commented on present manifestations of art in public domain, attempting to connect its history with the current debates towards its future incarnations.

See map of the exhibition here and download the exhibition guide here.

Hummings was co-curated by KØS curator Fulya Erdemci and KØS director Ulrikke Neergaard.

Hear SUPERFLEX, Jakob Jakobsen, Kerstin Bergendal, Maider López, Lea Guldditte Hestelund, Rune Bosse og Christoph Schäfer talk about their projects for Hummings in the videos below: