»Oops, We Walked Past the Artwork« – the Hidden Presences of Sound Art in Moss

When I arrived at the 13th edition of the MOMENTUM Biennial in Moss, Norway, I went to the toilet. I had walked a long way from my hotel to the exhibition site Galleri F 15, and my journey took me along fjords and fields, through town and forest. Zones that the curator Morten Søndergård had also experienced on his walks through the area, and which he had skillfully and tightly orchestrated the exhibition around. But more on that later. The weather on the biennial's opening day was described by the organizers as »better than they had ordered«, so I had drunk a lot of water on the way, and as a result, I headed straight for the toilet.

Suddenly, I felt artist Arendse Krabbe’s voice tickling behind my ear. In this intimate transitional space, she spoke both about and directly to my digestive system. Transgressive, I thought. The voice pointed out that we’re not in the habit of drinking the clean water in the toilet bowl, even though we could. True enough. So instead, I flushed my system’s »black water« (Krabbe’s term) noisily through the sewage system and out to the dying fish in Norway’s fjords. Welcome to MOMENTUM 13: Between/Worlds: Resonant Ecologies.

I unfortunately didn’t hear the entire piece for fear of causing a long queue at the women’s restroom

Arendse Krabbe is one of several Danes among many international names at MOMENTUM 2025. The biennial’s nearly 40 different works and performances can be experienced from June 14 to October 12. As always, it takes place about an hour’s drive south of Oslo in the town of Moss, at Galleri F 15, a former manor house with a view of the sea, located at the end of a long alleyway of creaking old trees – something like a Norwegian version of Aarhus’ Moesgaard. Here, the toilet monologue is one part of Krabbe’s two-part work We are all fish (2025), and outside in the courtyard, you can follow the water’s continued journey through the sewer system in a simulation resembling a well with installed sound. With a view of the fjord, you follow the wastewater’s path with your ears. Indoors, I unfortunately didn’t hear the entire piece for fear of causing a long queue at the women’s restroom.

Suddenly, I felt artist Arendse Krabbe’s voice tickling behind my ear

On the sensory edge

Sound as a transgressive medium is the artistic focal point of MOMENTUM 13. It’s already embedded in the festival’s title: Between/Worlds: Resonant Ecologies. And it’s quite a novel move. Before my journey, I had wondered why this biennial had slipped past my radar, even though, in the words of the gallery’s director Lise Pennington, it is »the oldest and most badass« biennial for contemporary art in the Nordic countries and has run every other year since 1998. The reason for my ignorance is quite simple: it’s the first time MOMENTUM specifically focuses on sound.

Curator Morten Søndergård, associate professor at Aalborg University – not to be confused with the poet of the same name – and a prominent figure in media and sound art research, has tackled the abstract concept of »resonance«. He uses it as a central metaphor for movement between different »worlds« – meaning species, systems, narratives, and environments.

Drawing inspiration from posthumanist thinkers like Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, the exhibition explores how sound can illuminate relationships between human and non-human ecologies. As Haraway puts it, resonance lets us »stay with the trouble« – it vibrates challengingly in the in-betweens, where friction and emergence take place instead of harmony. It’s about attending to the unheard, Søndergård explained in his opening speech, during which it was hard to hear anything over the birdsong.

The universe literally resonates around us

This ambition is clearly and satisfyingly fulfilled in the exhibition’s largest work, which also happens to be by a Danish artist. Christian Skjødt Hasselstrøm’s μ (2022/2025) is unavoidable: spread across the lawn in front of Galleri F 15, overlooking the fields and fjord, 120 brass hemispheres lie in a strict grid. Each one crackles.

Many walk among them, lie on the grass, gaze over the water, and listen to the amplified sound of cosmic particles that constantly – though imperceptibly – create flows on Earth. Using particle detector technology, the work connects a cosmic experience to an ultra-local setting right there on the lawn. It’s powerfully compelling. The universe literally resonates around us but cannot be sensed without mediation. Yes, what is perception of the physical world, really? the exhibition asks.

Sonic transits through zones: Where are the works?

This deliberate sensory provocation can also lead to missing the works entirely. I nearly overlooked the first indoor piece, where German-Finnish artist Antye Greie-Ripatti (AGF) had installed a kin layered song in the main entrance. It’s a work about singing voices across species, accompanied by a poem, but difficult to experience fully in this transitional space, since you literally block the doorway. And once our entire tour group had passed through the entrance, the guide exclaimed: »Oops, we walked past the artwork!«

Which brings us back to the walking zones. My own spontaneous hike turned out to mirror the curator’s vision, as the exhibition is divided into five zones: the urban environment of Moss, the geological area of Jeløy, the natural surroundings of the Alby forest, the underwater ecologies of the Oslofjord, and the institutional mediations of the gallery. »Worlds« might be a more accurate term, since this zone division – which could have served as a helpful structure – was confusingly absent from the works’ arrangement. Instead, it served more as a resonant backdrop for the various artistic perspectives, challenged by constant movement and transformation. And walking there was plenty of.

I walked with my senses finely tuned, constantly doubting what was art and what was nature

One can make a loop from Galleri F 15 through the forest down to the fjord and back along the fields. I walked with my senses finely tuned, constantly doubting what was art and what was nature. It was thrilling but also demanding. For example, I’m still not entirely sure whether I heard HC Gilje’s mechanical The Alby Critters (2025) in the woods or whether I could have gotten more from Jacob Kirkegaard’s import of radioactive water sounds from Chernobyl in The Grey Zone (NeverWhere) (2025), which was eerily unsettling. It required more time and mental stillness.

A stillness that a random resident in Moss unfortunately didn’t find while sitting on a bench by the water. He had apparently sat on an artwork. Norwegian artist Jana Winderen, who previously worked with underwater recording technologies, contributes to MOMENTUM 13 with a bench and a listening exercise in here: this place (2025). At the edge of  a forest and a fjord, there was a sound she simply didn’t  want to disturb. You can’t even blame John Cage for having had a hand in it. The bench didn’t challenge expectations but simply invited relaxation and reflection – as benches tend to do.

It almost felt like the sound itself had toppled a tree at the edge of the clearing

More attention-grabbing and refreshing was the final stop on the outdoor walk: Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s FOREST (for a thousand years…) (2012). Our group was caught in a forest clearing by choral singing just as our ears longed for harmony-familiar sound. Sitting on tree stumps in the forest’s natural »room«, we were immersed in audio stories of war, shouts, laughter, storms, and weapons. Organic and cultural worlds met, and it almost felt like the sound itself had toppled a tree at the edge of the clearing.

The movement between the outdoor works made a deep impression on me. As an artist, you’re definitely gifted a lot by such a setting, but the curation activated both feet and senses in a special way. With both soundwalks and long distances between works and venues, I’ll have to ask my editor for a new pair of hiking boots.

Telephoning glaciers and talking trees

In the indoor gallery zone, there’s a sharp focus on how connections between time, place, and species are made possible through technological media. There are especially a lot of telephones.

Scattered around the gallery are also three old rotary phones from Scottish artist Douglas Gordon’s Instruction series (1992, 1993, 2018), where a voice initiates an intimate conversation when you pick up the receiver. The video work Telephones (1995) by artist and composer Christian Marclay greets visitors in the gift shop. It’s a montage of non-verbal telephone moments from pop culture films: wordless sequences of dialing, answering, and hanging up.

From a more contemporary angle, Danish artist Mogens Jacobsen’s Razz Ring (2025) stages the constant surveillance in modern smartphones.

A kind of hacking system gathers data from all phones entering the space and plays a meditative tone through singing bowls arranged in a large semicircle. A kind of inverted phone yoga, as the artist called it, where the phones actually make us look up. From the catalog description, I had high hopes for this piece, but the actual experience was disappointingly brief – a single ding.

More striking is Calling the Glacier (2007) by Latvian/German/Austrian artist Kalle Aldis Laar. It’s a direct phone line to the Vernagtferner glacier in Austria. You can hear it melting. It’s disturbing, simple, and utterly brilliant. The work gives voice to the non-human – if you choose to call. This handheld communication between species, so beautifully realized here, is also a recurring theme throughout the biennial, notably in the many talking trees placed in the outdoor areas.

Canadian artist Stephanie Loveless’ Spisslønn / Norway Maple (2025) is, for example, a direct conversation to and between Norway maples across the Atlantic about being an invasive species – both as tree and as human. English-Norwegian artist Natasha Barrett’s Talking Trees (2025) offers an almost ASMR-like interactive listening experience of Norwegian and English trees, steered by the wind.

There are whale songs, page-turning winds, and talking stones. And then there’s the swan song.

From innocence to hoarse friction

A short hour’s walk from Gallery F 15, at Moss Church, Svanesang (2025) had its world premiere. Over the course of a year, the Danish artists Marie Højlund, Julian Toldahm Juhlin, and Christian Albrechtsen recorded boys’ voices in transition from the Herning Church Boys’ Choir. The church was therefore a perfect setting for the premiere, filled with harmonious choir singing interrupted by trembling voice trials.

I couldn’t help but feel hypocritical as I listened to a world from an ultra-local place I had polluted in order to get there

This human-centered sound, where falsetto is absent in favor of a hoarse whisper, strangely stands apart from the many non-human actors that otherwise dominate the biennial. At the same time, Svanesang may be the work most clearly aligned with the artistic ambitions: an aesthetic amplification of what we otherwise overhear. The spaces in between. The biological conditions within our bodies. A fleeting now. An inescapable movement from the innocence of childhood to the complexity of adulthood.

It dawned on me that all this constant boundary-crossing between beings and worlds, despite its posthumanist origin, ultimately aims to sensorially articulate connections for the human apparatus. Together, the works emphasize a transit from innocence to insightful struggle. We arrived as humans in our comfort, directly from planes (some even from the other side of the world), from soft hotel beds and taxis to an exhibition we washed down with champagne and focaccia – and where, out of concern for the climate, the majority naturally chose the vegetarian catering options. I couldn’t help but feel hypocritical as I listened to a world from an ultra-local place I had polluted in order to get there.

Don’t bring a friend unless they are quiet

MOMENTUM 13 – Between/Worlds: Resonant Ecologies highlights such friction and transit. So go to Moss, because it is an important art experience where the sound medium makes room for overlooked modalities and overheard voices. Go, wear good shoes, and don’t bring a friend unless they are quiet, so you don’t miss the artworks. Take your time – preferably a couple of days – because it’s an exhibition that demands calm for immersion as well as a thorough look at the catalogue. MOMENTUM 13 makes great demands on the viewer, for better or worse. Because honestly, there are probably some works I never found.

MOMENTUM 13, Moss, Norway, June 14 – October 12

English translation: Andreo Michaelo Mielczarel. Proofreading: Seb Doubinsky