“Symphony of a Missing Room – archive of the forgotten and remembered unfolds a tender poem bound up between the hearts of Christer Lundahl and Martina Seitl. Rhythmically, emotions materialize in Symphony, then fade away, only to re-emerge as elegies of experiences, past and present. As the pulse of their work quickens so too does your sentiment and fervidness. In essence, this is the Lundahl & Seitl imprimatur. Emerging through the exponential growth of artistic complexities, and layering moods, their mixed narratives evolve.

“At the outset of the performance – it was first conceived in 2009 – visitors pull on nearly opaque goggles designed to translate crisp reality, the reality immediately beyond the goggles’ lenses, into milky impressions, moody with atmosphere. You may have already intuited that the blinding goggles are not to narrow experience, as one could suppose, rather, the very opposite. But the blinding effect? Well of course it envelops you, and precisely for that very reason, you skate along experience’s freshest edge.

“If you have no idea what is coming next, well, just imagine … things begin to close in, and equally if oppositely, exaggerate what you are living through. Why? Because in the end, the simple goggles first isolate only to intensify. The effect pricks intimate experience, which outside the goggles has become all too scarce. In lieu of sight, your other senses gradually heighten, eclipsing your eye’s literalism with the visionary, with apparition, even flickering insight. Immediately following on, it becomes apparent that Lundahl & Seitl have designed-in a second stage to your initial experience; a stage, no one could have foreseen . . . ethereal encounters creep in, and however blinded, you are hardly visionless, and while not hallucinating, you feel as if you see into what others hardly can. Startled when your Guide gently slides-up, you can’t help but sense you’re on the verge of something . . . of some unfamiliar form of cunning artfulness, which feels as if it is about to cave in around you.”

Text excerpt from ‘And Then? They Do.’ by Ronald Jones, artist and critic, written for the London presentation of Symphony of a Missing Room. Read the full essay here.

Presented by LIFT and the Royal Academy of Arts. Supported by Festivals in Transition — Global City Local City with the support of the Culture Programme of the European Union.

Why Symphony in Athens now?
Christiana Galanopoulou, 2012

MIRfestival is an international contemporary art festival which welcomes experimental and adventurous creation at the meeting point of arts, at the crossroads of performing arts and visual new media. It shares meaningful, fresh, exciting works of contemporary art with Athenians. It enables meetings between artists and between artists and the audience. It is a place where artists share their vision of the world with audiences ready to make a shift, to question their views, to be propelled to new horizons and to see new realities emerge. Lundahl & Seitl’s work is situated exactly at the point where a completely new genre is being born for contemporary art, as it evolves a new type of artwork centred on the area in between the embodied and the virtual aspects of human experience.

Symphony of a Missing Room is a unique work of contemporary art: poetic, meaningful and incredibly innovative. Lundahl & Seitl have their own way of looking at history, at art, at time. Greece is going through a very hard period in its history. If there have ever been any certainties, all of them are now being questioned. In times like this, the most fragile things are the intangible ones: understanding history, being part of a civilized society, having a vision, experiencing time in perspective. All the things we were proud of in the Europe we have known up till now are at this moment ready to collapse. The most endangered one is vision: as vision is what gives a society the wings to fly towards tomorrow, it is the most powerful and at the same time the most fragile thing we have. If someone wanted to break a society, one would strike out at that place: at its most visionary agents. And this is what Greece is going through at this time. Symphony is about vision, about the human ability to use our imagination to comprehend the past and dream of the future. As the artists state, “history is proposed here as a kind of ‘backwards prophesying’: The art museum thus becomes a repository of disjunct visuals that project, prophesy and document both the past and the future”. MIRfestival has made a huge effort to make this work happen in Athens and share it with the Athenian audience, exactly because it is extremely important that people experience this work at this particular time. The Acropolis Museum has been chosen not only because it is the most representative museum of the city, but also because it is a symbol for what Greece has offered to humanity: civilization, which is now endangered. Extremely honoured by that, MIRfestival has been exceptionally granted the permission to present Symphony in The Acropolis Museum: it is the first time a contemporary work of art is being hosted by The Acropolis Museum and particularly in the permanent collection galleries.

Hamburger Kunsthalle, commissioned by International Summerfestival Hamburg

At Hamburger Kunsthalle, Symphony of a Missing Room takes its conceptual starting point in the Alice in Wonderland exhibition. Appropriating the museum’s guided tour, the artwork takes the visitors on both a collective and extremely personal journey. The painting Awaken, by Millais, shows a little girl in the state between sleep and awakening. This image starts the work’s itinerary, a walk that traverses layers of physical and imaginary architecture of the museum, always in proximity to the concepts and visions of the existing curatorial space, at the same time as it evaporates the art objects within – they become a memory, leaving no shadow.

The tour continue via the exhibition Lost Spaces. Here the group of six visitors find themselves standing in the centre of an installation by Jan Köchermann. Köchermann’s work, Dead End, is a hub of interrupted corridors and passages that offer no way to go further – beyond Newtonian physics – where things are made into matter when you bump your head into a wall. But where there is no door one has to invent new ways of entering. Through wireless headphones with three-dimensional sound, worn by visitors, they are asked to close their eyes …or otherwise they will not see anything.

The sound of a door opening, a voice whispering “come” and a hand gently leading the visitor through the impassable ‘dead end’ installation into a vast gallery space …where nothing been displayed before.

Immersed in art history, which we usually observe at a distance, the visitor can now traverse the accumulated layers of acoustic spaces from the collection of museums previously inhabited by the work. While Symphony of a Missing Room is concerned by physical displays of history described and embodied by museums, it is also a learning machine, that absorbs and reconstitutes its own past, reciting the lessons of that past each time it is physically refashioned, and each time begins again.

The process of creating Symphony of a Missing Room at S.M.A.K.

We spent time in the museum building just to connect with the artworks and the existing curatorial space. Our approach was to capture what appeared to us, rather than research the background and intention of the works on display. Some interesting connections have come out of this process…

One artist’s work explores the uncontrollable zone between dreaming and waking. What we take from this is the dream of an individual who cannot free himself from collective memory. This translates into the work for a point during Symphony of a Missing Room, when the visitor feels as if they are being dreamt by the museum, that they are inside a dream in which they are not completely themselves; they do not know what is coming next and what hides behind the corner.

A disembodied voice leads the visitor on a collaborative process of re-interpreting the artworks and the idea of the museum itself, through a series of instructions, choreographed cues and suggestions.

Another moment in Symphony of a Missing Room is where the visitors’ goggles are taken off and, after having been blinded for some time, they see their surrounding physical space again. At S.M.A.K., the visitors find that they are standing in the middle of The Dada Room, an installation by Romanian artist Adrian Ghenie. They are simultaneously inside The Dada Room and inside Symphony of a Missing Room – the visitors’ experience is like that of a dreamer who is in a dream within a dream, without finding the way out into a state of waking. They have the experience of being unable to free themselves from collective memory and history and become aware of the highly mediated reality they find themselves in on a daily basis.

Symphony of a Missing Room is exhibited inside museums as well as being a temporal museum about itself, reflecting back on its own chain of discoveries. With the commission from Salzburger Festspiele, a legendary theater/music festival, and the curatorial space of the current exhibition at Museum der Moderne (called Role Models and Role Playing), the work naturally entered the parallel history of theatre.

Museum der Moderne is on a mountain overlooking Salzburg. This perspective – that of a watchman overlooking the city – was used as an image to explore the idea of the museum as an observer and keeper of history. But here history is proposed as a kind of “backwards prophesying”; just as one must imagine an event that someone says will happen, one must similarly imagine an event you are told has already happened.