2016 - 2022
piano, 30,000 bees, speakers
Fugue in B Flat, 2016 is a grand piano modified into a beehive. The sound of the bees interacting with the piano strings is amplified via live feed from a contact microphone on the piano soundboard.
Fugue in B Flat is a time–based sculpture with visual and audio feedback of a natural system of logic and survival colonizing a man-made system of order and harmony.
The sculpture made its debut in 2016 in Socrates Sculpture Park, as a commission for the park’s 25th Anniversary exhibition, LANDMARK, and traveled as an indoor beehive to Temple Contemporary.
This sculpture was commissioned in 2016, a celebration of both the 25th Anniversary of Socrates Sculpture Park and New York City’s legalization of beekeeping. Fugue later moved to Swale and then Temple University. It was exhibited as a sound sculpture (with recorded audio) in the exhibition ecofeminism(s) in 2020, curated by Monika Fabijanska at Thomas Erben Gallery.
ideo and audio recordings from the 2016 sculpture were used for a multi-room sound installation and video work, Terrapolis, at Regelbau 411, DK in 2022.
For this installation, 4 of the 5 rooms of the former Nazi bunker on the Unesco site where Regelbau operates, were transformed into an audio installation. Various sounds recorded over the sculpture’s tenure were filling the rooms, divided into categories: humming, chewing, buzzing, chirping. Visitors moved through the darkness, guided by sound.
This score was performed by Yiannis Loukos for the solo exhibition, Zu Summen, at Scope Berlin in 2023.
Fugue has implications not only to declining insect populations and our relationship with nature as consumers and urban dwellers, but in trust and our contractual relationship to each other in a network of overlapping intimacies.
Video of installation
Video of performance