From object to subject: two art installations at MMF24

Music moves through the body and builds connections between people. Artist Esther Kempf presents two installations that visualize movement and share the strategy of deflection on the festival site of Music Meeting 2024. For both works she uses natural materials such as water, steam and smoke, and she makes use of existing conditions such as the water point at the festival, the festival furniture and boats that pass through Nijmegen.

In the work Body to body to body, festival furniture is connected by garden hoses that lead to the water dispenser. The drinking water flows through chairs, tables and benches before reaching the bodies of festival visitors. The second installation will be an on-site development, with which Kempf wants to convert rhythm and movement into a visual phenomenon that is visible on the festival site.

Esther Kempf (*1980 Cameroon / lives in Switzerland) studied visual art and scenography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and graduated in 2005. She develops her installations site-specifically and experimentally. She responds to architectural structures, peculiarities and histories of a place and combines them with longer-term research. Parts of buildings, pieces of furniture, everyday objects, plants and even the sun become protagonists of Kempf's works. They are transformed from objects into subjects, acquiring a character of their own, an apparent will or a kind of soul. Sound, movement, rhythm and timing are of great importance in her work.

Picture Esther Kempf: David Marti