Rothko Museum to Explore the Hidden Sounds of Nordic Waters
From 30 October to 29 November, the Rothko Museum in Daugavpils will present “Sound’s Hidden Journey under Nordic Waters”, an immersive multimedia exhibition exploring the human connection with the underwater world.
Created by the Danish arts company Between Music, the travelling exhibition draws on underwater sound 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 the recordings into individual artistic interpretations spanning sound, music and moving images.
At the heart of the exhibition is an immersive sound installation featuring compositions by three 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.
The exhibition opens on 30 October at 5 p.m. Admission to the opening is by invitation only.
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.
Photo: publicity image
