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Oliver Beer Born 1985, Kent, United Kingdom Lives and works in London, United Kingdom, and Paris, France Explored through the common language of breath, Oliver Beer’s Composition for Mouths (Songs My Mother Taught Me) I & II 2018 is a video and sound installation that takes shape around ideas of cultural memory and musical inheritance. Developed while Beer was artist-in-residence at the Sydney Opera House, the work brings together two videos in which same-sex couples, their lips pressed together to create a single cavity, sing different childhood songs into each other’s mouths. In the first video, bass singer Clive Birch delivers a children’s hymn ‘Two little eyes to look to God’ into the mouth of Yanyuwa man Tim Moriarty, as he sings an Indigenous song learnt from his aunts as a child. A similarly unique amalgamation of musical cultures is found in the second video, in which sopranos Alyx Dennison and Sonya Hollowell merge an Indian classical raga with a melody by twelfth-century German Benedictine abbess and polymath composer Hildegard of Bingen. The intermingling voices of the performers fuse to create rhythmic, microtonal and harmonic interactions — known technically as ‘beats’ — which register as a sort of subtly modulated humming. The effect is raw, visceral and almost unbearably intimate, with the performers’ bodies becoming resonant vessels, transformed into acoustic spaces for the duration of the piece. They literally ‘play’ each other’s faces like instruments, as Beer explains: ‘With nowhere else to go, their lungs are emptied out through each other’s noses, and, at the meeting point of the two voices, a third voice appears’. 1 1 Oliver Beer, artist statement 2018, QAGOMA Curatorial files. Oliver Beer / Composition for Mouths (Songs My Mother Taught Me) I & II (stills, details) 2018 91 90 Shared Shared