Oliver Beer: The Cave

Lullabies, traditional songs, and vodou melodies intertwine in this autumn’s major installation at Kiasma, bringing to life the atmosphere and acoustics of a painted prehistoric cave. The exhibition presents the second iteration of British artist Oliver Beer’s video opera Resonance Project: The Cave, which premiered at the Lyon Biennale in 2024. The installation runs at Kiasma from November 6, 2026 to March 28, 2027.

Beer was granted special permission to work and film inside Font-de-Gaume, an archaeologically significant cave in southwestern France renowned for its hundreds of prehistoric paintings, some dating back more than 15,000 years. 
While studying the cave’s acoustics, Beer discovered that its strongest resonances occur in areas with the highest concentration of paintings. Singing a low F note causes the cave to vibrate, amplifying the sound many times over.

“I always suspected that these Paleolithic caves in Dordogne would sing in a really incredible way. And when I finally got access to go inside and I whispered the right note to the cave and the cave screamed its note back at me ten times louder, we knew that something special was going on.” —Oliver Beer

Beer invited singers from around the world to tune into the cave’s unique frequency and activate its resonance. Musicians from diverse musical traditions—Rufus Wainwright, Woodkid, eee gee, Mélissa Laveaux, Hamed Sinno, Jean-Christophe Brizard, Mo’Ju, and Michiko Takahashi—were each invited to perform the earliest song they could remember from childhood. Beer then wove these melodies, passed down through generations, into a new polyphonic composition.

The installation comprises 16 audio channels and eight monumental video projections arranged throughout the exhibition space. Together, the singers’ voices resonate across the gallery, evoking the experience of a cave that only a handful of people will ever have the chance to visit. The exhibition also features paintings made by Beer using pigments set in motion by sound alone, rendering visible the geometries that sound carves through space.

The exhibition is curated by Patrik Nyberg and Anna Mustonen from Kiasma.

Resonance Project: The Cave continues a series Beer began in 2007, exploring the relationships between sound, place, and cultural memory. Earlier iterations of the project have activated the acoustics of an Ottoman bathhouse, the Sydney Opera House and the glass tunnels of the Centre Pompidou.

Oliver Beer brings together music and visual art in his practice. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. His work has been presented at major institutions including MoMA PS1, New York; Centre Pompidou, Opéra Garnier, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Palais de Tokyo and Château de Versailles, Paris; Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon; West Bund Museum and Long Museum, Shanghai; and the Sydney, Istanbul, Lyon and Venice Biennales. He has participated in the British Art Show 9 and completed residencies at the Watermill Center and Villa Albertine, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Sydney Opera House; and Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, France. Beer studied musical composition at the Academy of Contemporary Music, London; fine art at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford; and film theory at the Sorbonne, Paris.