Inaugurated on 7 June 2022 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Bill Fontana’s 10-channel sound installation Silent Echoes: Notre-Dame makes a hidden acoustic scene perceptible by allowing the ten mighty bells of Notre-Dame Cathedral, one of Paris’ most emblematic monuments, to resound once more after the fire that seemingly sentenced them to silence in 2019. With special permission granted by the French authorities, Fontana places accelerometers on each one of the cathedral’s ten bells so as to record their resonance while the building’s restoration is still under way until 2024. The work makes audible, in distinctive Fontana fashion, the slightest vibrations of the cathedral’s most ancient bell “Emmanuel”, along with its nine counterparts, as they respond to the ambient Parisian sounds, further conveying these mystical sounds from Paris to Istanbul through a live streaming infrastructure.
Exhibited in Istanbul after its unveiling during an inaugural event through a speaker system placed on the terrace of the Centre Pompidou, one of Paris’ iconic architectural landmarks, almost directly facing the Notre-Dame Cathedral, Silent Echoes: Notre-Dame intimately connects with John Cage’s idea that “music is permanent; only listening is intermittent”, and honours Arter with the privilege of being the first museum in the world to host the project outside Paris.
Visitors are granted the remarkable opportunity to experience the auditory environment laid out by Bill Fontana’s Silent Echoes: Notre-Dame through ten speakers placed on Arter’s -3 floor, concurrently with another work by the artist: Resounding Io, displayed in Arter’s performance hall Karbon. The documentation video produced by the Centre Pompidou on the occasion of the exhibition in Paris and Fontana’s experimental video produced in relation with Silent Echoes: Notre-Dame will also be on display in Arter’s Sevgi Gönül Auditorium from 13 September to 4 December 2022.
Video screening schedule:
Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday
12:00, 14:00, 16:00, 18:00
General Info