Oliver Beer « Reanimation Paintings : A Thousand Voices»

A project in two parts:

4 October 2024 - 12 January 2025 
Chapter 1: Drawing and sound collection workshops

11 April - 13 July 2025
Chapter 2: Exhibition of Reanimation films produced by Oliver Beer

Starting in October 2024, at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, thousands of children will help produce a participatory work of art entitled A Thousand Voices, as part of the Reanimation Paintings series conceived by British artist
Oliver Beer.

     

Left-hand visual: Oliver Beer Preview of the drawing studio for the “Reanimation Paintings , A Thousand Voices” exhibition 2024 © Oliver Beer Studio
Right-hand visual: Oliver Beer Preview of the sound studio for the “Reanimation Paintings , A Thousand Voices” exhibition 2024 © Oliver Beer Studio 

The A Thousand Voices project will start with a sound and drawing collection phase that will take place in two studios designed by Oliver Beer in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection rooms from October 2024 to January 2025. This rich material will be made up of drawings and sound recordings created by the young participants.
Oliver Beer has chosen four works from MAM’s collections (Victor Brauner, Nina Childress, Sonia Delaunay and Georges Rouault) that will be reinterpreted in four films directed by the artist at the end of the project. Music, as the common thread running through the artist’s work, guided the selection of these masterpieces from the museum.
Every child – whether accompanied by their class (from the end of nursery school to the last year of high school) or visiting individually – will be invited to reinterpret and take ownership of one of the museum’s four works, through a drawing exercise. The drawings from the workshop will then be assembled and printed on film, at 12 frames per second, to create four animated films. Similarly, the sounds recorded by the children will form the main material for a new immersive composition that will accompany the films.
All the children, their schools, and all MAM’s visitors will be able to discover these films at the exhibition organised at the museum in spring 2025.

A participatory experience
This participatory experience, involving pupils from nursery school to high school, aims to create a new relationship between the public and MAM’s collections. The artist and museum are seeking to provide children with a genuine opportunity to reinterpret works and see their creations join the museum’s collections.
“Each child contributes a unique drawing that responds to one of the works on display at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, transforming paintings through their own hands and minds. The children are invited to copy but freely reinterpret their selected painting. I then scan and print their images onto 16 mm film to reconstitute the painting as a static animation. The result of this reanimation is that the film screen becomes a vibrating canvas, whose surface is constantly changing and being recreated. [...]
The exhibition shows how individual creative gestures contribute to the culture of which they are a part, and how recurring ideas across space and time can be borrowed, transformed and subverted. [...]
The works form part of a shared human story that the museum has chosen to preserve in its collections; their reinterpretation by children is a new way of perceiving these paintings. There is an immediate sensory stimulation in seeing the imaginations of thousands of children flash before your eyes. But behind the drawings are both individual and universal stories [...]” Oliver Beer, 2023 

   

Workshop with children in Abu Dhabi for the production of “Reanimation Painting (Portrait of Fayoum)” 2019 © Oliver Beer Studio

Biography of the artist
Oliver Beer trained in musical composition before attending the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, and studying cinematic theory at the Sorbonne, Paris. This musical background is reflected in his live performances, films, installations, paintings and sculptures, which reveal the hidden acoustic properties of bodies and architectural environments. The artist’s familial relationships often inform multi-disciplinary works that engage with intimate yet universal concerns, such as the sounds and memories contained within personal possessions. Beer explores the unifying potential of music that resonates across history, generations and cultures, as embodied in objects and spaces.
Oliver Beer’s work has been presented at the Met Breuer and MoMA PS1 in New York; Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE in London; Centre Pompidou, the Opéra Garnier, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Palais de Tokyo and Palace of Versailles in Paris; the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon; the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art in Australia; the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham; WIELS in Brussels; the West Bund Museum in Shanghai; and the biennials of Sydney, Istanbul and Venice. He participated in British Art Show 9 and has held residencies at Palais de Tokyo, the Watermill Centre, the Sydney Opera House, and Fondation d’entreprise Hermès. In 2024, his work is being showcased in France as part of the Normandie Impressionniste festival and the 17th edition of Lyon Biennale. 

Oliver Beer ©️ Philippe Laumont

Partners
This project is being carried out with the support of the Thaddaeus Ropac and Almine Rech galleries and Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso.
The collective workshop has received support from the Swiss company Caran d’Ache, which has supplied coloured pencils and wax and oil pastels.
The exhibition is supported by the British Council as part of the UK/France Spotlight on Culture 2024 programme Together We Imagine, whose objectives are to celebrate the relationship between France and the United Kingdom and revitalise an intercultural dialogue around art and culture.
This project has been supported by the City of Paris as part of the Cultural Olympiad.
Lastly, the Museum would like to thank the Society of Friends of the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris for supporting the exhibition.

Curator : Olivia Gaultier-Jeanroy, curator at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris