Rapture

The Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA) is pleased to announce the official inauguration of the Nordic pavilion in the 56th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, by Her Royal Highness Crown Princess Mette-Marit of Norway, on 6 May, 2015. This year Norway will be solely responsible for the Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale for the first time in its history. For this unprecedented occasion, OCA has commissioned artist Camille Norment (b. 1970) to develop the project.

Norment’s ‘Rapture’ is a site-specific, sculptural and sonic installation in the Nordic Pavilion, for which the American-born, Oslo-based artist has composed new music on the glass armonica – a legendary 18th-century instrument that creates ethereal music from glass and water. Invented by Benjamin Franklin and once played by Mozart and Marie Antoinette, the glass armonica was at first celebrated for curing people with its entrancing music, but later it was banned because it was thought to induce states of ecstasy and arouse sexual excitement in women. If it had the power to cure, so the logic went, this bewitching instrument might also have the power to kill through over-exciting its listeners.

In a contemporary context, Norment explores the tensions this music raises today by creating a multi-sensory space, which reflects upon the history of sound, contemporary concepts of harmony and dissonance, and the water, glass and light of Venice. She is composing a new chorus of voices that correspond to the notes of the glass armonica, and this chorus will surround visitors to ‘Rapture’. She will also perform a new composition on the glass armonica during the opening days of the Venice Biennale. Additionally, throughout the run of the Biennale, she will invite artists and musicians to participate in a series of performances that echo elements in the installation.

‘Rapture’ will explore the relationship between the human body and sound, through visual, sonic, sculptural and architectural stimuli. Today the sonic realm can be both a space of misuse, as we have seen in the militaristic use of sound to abuse the body, and of affirmation, as in the performative utterance of free speech to affirm the right of the body’s very existence. The body can be stimulated and moved by sound, and in Norment’s work, the Nordic Pavilion itself becomes a body in rapture and rupture, harmony and dissonance.

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