Jacob Kirkegaard
TESTIMONIUM
February 27 – March 27, 2021
Fridman Gallery is honored to announce the U.S. premiere of Jacob Kirkegaard’s Testimonium. The audio-visual installation was created from recordings of recycling and wastewater facilities in Denmark and Latvia, and one of the world’s largest landfills in Dandora, Kenya.
For the first time, Testimonium will be presented in its most complete form: the video installation will be accompanied by an eight-channel sound sculpture, and a large-scale photograph of the desolate industrial landscape. The video will be available for viewing and listening on the gallery’s website for the duration of the exhibition.
Kirkegaard created the audio work with vibration sensors placed inside piles of organic waste and incinerators; hydrophones lowered in wastewater and heavily contaminated rivers; and high-fidelity microphones pointed at metal, glass and plastic sorted by hand or machine. The field recordings allow the listener to go beyond the miasma of discarded matter and into its physical core and
industrial journey.
Jacob Kirkegaard’s spatial installations, photography, and sound sculpture are created through field recordings that capture profound dimensions of the world around him. His works reveal unheard and unseen phenomena, and present listening (to both sound and imagery) as a means of experiencing the environment. Kirkegaard has recorded locations as different as empty rooms in Chernobyl, Arctic calving glaciers, vibrating border walls, and tones generated by the human inner ear itself.
Kirkegaard began exploring sound recordings at the age of six. He graduated from the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne in 2006 and has exhibited at numerous institutions throughout the world, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Hood Museum, ARoS, KW, The Menil Collection, Rothko Chapel, Aichi Triennale, and Mori Art Museum. Kirkegaard’s work is in the collections of LOUISIANA Museum of Modern Art and ARoS Aarhus Art Museum in Denmark, and Bell Gallery at Brown University.