Sound’s Hidden Journey under Nordic Waters
Between Music (Denmark)
Beneath the surface of water lies an acoustic world largely unfamiliar to human ears. Sound travels approximately four times faster through water than through air, creating unusual patterns of reflection and reverberation. It plays with our sense of direction, blurring the boundaries between ourselves and our surroundings and creating a sense of disorientation and ambiguity. What happens when this unfamiliar sonic world is brought to the surface?
“Sound’s Hidden Journey under Nordic Waters” is an immersive sound art exhibition that explores our connection with water through recordings from deep lakes in Arctic Finland and the fjords of Greenland and the Faroe Islands. Collected over several years of fieldwork and acoustic research, these recordings capture the distinctive echoes and reverberations of submerged environments, revealing a world of sound rarely accessible to human perception.
Four Nordic artists, each with a longstanding interest in water, have transformed these recordings into individual artistic interpretations spanning sound, music and moving images.
At the heart of the exhibition is an immersive sound installation featuring compositions bythree artists. Laila Skovmand (Denmark) explores communication between species through underwater singing and whale songs. Jens L. Thomsen (Faroe Islands) evokes the sea as both a source of life and a force of destruction, drawing on the memory of sailors lost at sea. Petri Kuljuntausta (Finland) creates an underwater soundscape in which natural reverberations are disrupted by the noise of a ship’s engine.
In a separate audiovisual work, “Ode to the Melting Ice”, Inuk Silis Høegh (Greenland) reflects on the fragility of Arctic ecosystems in the face of climate change.
The exhibition also features documentary films tracing the artists’ explorations of underwater sound and their individual approaches to water, from scientific research to questions of mythology and environmental ethics.
Between Music is a Danish arts company working across music, performance, visual art and technology. It gained international recognition for AquaSonic, an innovative underwater concert performance in which musicians play specially developed instruments inside large water tanks. The company’s interdisciplinary projects bring together sound artists, instrument makers, scientists and specialists in fields ranging from acoustics and engineering to marine biology and neuroscience.
The exhibition was prepared in collaboration with the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, University of South Denmark, Teledyne Marine and Miklagard.
Creation of the exhibition was supported by Nordisk Kulturfond, Danish Arts Foundation, Nordic Culture Point, Nordens Institute I Grønland, City of Aarhus, Dansk Komponist Forening, Koda Kultur and William Demant Foundation.
The exhibition’s presentation at the Rothko Museum is supported by the Nordic Council of Ministers’ Office in Latvia as part of its 35th-anniversary celebration.
30 October – 29 November 2026
Photo: publicity image
