Oliver Beer: Compositions for Mouths, Face and Hands Solo show at Esker Foundation, Calgary, Canada
Compositions for Mouths, Face and Hands presents a deeply sensorial investigation into the body as a vessel for sound and exchange. Spanning two paired video works—Composition for Mouths (Songs My Mother Taught Me) I & II and Composition for Face and Hands (ASMR)—this exhibition draws together ideas of resonance and relationality, exploring how sound and touch can become forms of communion between individuals, temporalities, and spaces.
In Composition for Mouths (Songs My Mother Taught Me) I & II, created during Beer’s residency at the Sydney Opera House, the artist invited professional singers to recall the earliest songs they learned in childhood. These songs—cultural fragments inherited from family, tradition, or spiritual life—become the foundation for a series of hauntingly intimate duets. The performers join their lips to form a single shared mouth cavity, blending their voices in a resonant chamber of flesh and breath. Through this configuration, at once corporeal and symbolically unifying, the singers explore the resonant frequencies of each other’s faces as acoustic vessels. The resulting compositions are woven from adapted memories, vocal improvisation, visceral alliance, and microtonal ‘beats’—rhythmic harmonic interactions vibrating against one another.
These moments of harmony and dissonance reflect the complexities of cultural memory itself: overlapping, evolving, and occasionally producing a kind of friction. In Composition for Mouths I, a tenor performs an Indigenous song passed down by his aunts, while his counterpart performs the children’s hymn, ‘Two Little Eyes to Look to God.’ In Composition for Mouths II, two sopranos merge an Indian classical raga with a melody by medieval Benedictine abbess and composer Hildegard of Bingen. These compositions become the site of an active negotiation between the registers of bodily resonance and personal and cultural memory.
This exploration of the body as a site of sound and exchange continues in Composition for Face and Hands (ASMR), a diptych in which two pairs of percussionists use one another’s faces as a percussion instrument. Building from the lightest touch to more forceful gestures, the performers coax rhythms and musicality from skin, bone, and hair. At once tender and unsettling, the performances move between gentleness and aggression, between control and intense rhythmic surrender.
Beer’s works reveal the body not only as a source of sound but as a medium of exchange—intimate, cultural, and corporeal. Whether by joining mouths or striking faces, the performers in these works become both instrument and archive: conduits for traditions passed through generations, vibrations that travel through flesh, and memories that echo through shared, vulnerable experience.
