Oliver Beer, 'Reanimation Paintings: A Thousand Voices' At the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris

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.

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 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.

“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