2024 Nanjing Art Fair International (NAFI 2024南京国际艺术博览会)

Booth A3

Almine Rech is pleased to announce its participation in 2024 Nanjing Art Fair International, with a video work by Oliver Beer. 

Born 1985 in Kent, UK, Oliver Beer now lives and works between London and Paris.
Oliver Beer creates sculptures, paintings, installations, videos, and immersive live performances that reveal the hidden properties and musicality of objects, bodies, and architectural sites. Drawing on his musical training, his social and familial relationships often become the blueprint for multidisciplinary works that engage with intimate and universal concerns, such as the transmission of musical memories and the personal and cultural meanings invested in the objects we possess. 

The artist’s work has been the subject of many solo and group exhibitions, notably at Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA PS1 in New York; London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE in London; Palais de Tokyo, Centre Pompidou, Château de Versailles, Musée d’Art Moderne and Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris; West Bund Museum in Shanghai and the Sydney, Istanbul, Lyon and Venice biennales. His works are part of major public collections, including the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Centre Pompidou and Kadist Collection in Paris; Deji Art Museum in Nanjing; Long Museum in Shanghai and the National Museum of Art in Osaka.

The video Mum’s Continuous Note presents a moment of intimacy with the artist’s mother. Eulogy on the beauty of sound and harmony, and the emotions which they can provoke, for 3 minutes she sings a continuous note without seeming to stop to catch her breath. Through the subtitles which appear beneath her image, the singer explains – not without humour – her apparent virtuosity, her method of circular breathing, and emotive potential of the harmonies which she creates with the aid of a miniature blue guitar.

Behind its light tone, the work presents an ontological dissection of the nature of sound and the voice. The singer explains how a single sung note is in fact composed of five or more harmonics, which our brain synthesises and interprets as a single sound.

Hall A
Nanjing International Exhibition Center
Nanjing, China (南京国际展览中心A馆）

Tickets online here