The sound artist Hans Rosenstr\u00f6m could not have known that the US would be at war by the time his project, Out of Silence, launched at Four Freedoms Park in New York (until 21 June). But Franklin D. Roosevelt\u2019s warnings to humanity on the importance of freedom of speech and worship, and from want and fear\u2014articulated in a 1941 speech in support of the US joining the Second World War\u2014are all the more potent for it.<\/p>\n
Rosenstr\u00f6m envisioned his project as an homage to the act of speech rather than to patriotic rhetoric. His multi-speaker, site-specific sound installation was \u201cpartly inspired by the Four Freedoms speech, and partly inspired by my relationship to how I think about human voices as means or a medium to travel between people\u201d, the Finnish artist explains.<\/p>\n
Known in his native Nordic territories for sculpting space with sound, including in last year\u2019s Helsinki Biennial, Rosenstr\u00f6m has rarely had the opportunity to exhibit in the US. He hails from Helsinki, lives in Stockholm and spent six months in New York in 2024 on an International Studio & Curatorial Program residency, which is how Out of Silence began to come together. When the Latvian curator Alina Girshovich approached him about a public art commission to mark the 90th birthday of the Estonian composer Arvo P\u00e4rt last year, Rosenstr\u00f6m jumped at the chance. \u201cI\u2019m not an expert in his music or his compositions,\u201d he says. \u201cI don\u2019t know how to write music, but I\u2019m sensitive to sound\u2014as we all are.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rosenstr\u00f6m continues: \u201cWe are constantly surrounded by voices; they very much affect the way we experience the present and our relationship with our surroundings.\u201d Out of Silence, curated by Girshovich, is a sonic composition of layered, recorded voices sung by the Estonian choir Vox Clamantis, staggered across Four Freedoms Park as four sections rooted in four sites within the park, using the human voice as a building block to impact the environment they are presented in. The park\u2019s marble-stelae-lined memorial to FDR was designed by the architect Louis Kahn, who was born in Estonia and benefited from New Deal programmes when he was starting out in the US\u2014affording him first-hand experience of FDR\u2019s humanitarian ideals in practice.<\/p>\n
\u201cRoosevelt said these four freedoms he speaks about are not some future dream but something to manifest during our lifetime,\u201d Rosenstr\u00f6m says. \u201cThrough our own voices, we shape the surroundings where we live.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The sound artist Hans Rosenstr\u00f6m could not have known that the US would be at war by the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":229130,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[30766,7148,83442,9,24,55,54,56,89973],"class_list":["post-229129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-american-history","tag-freedom-of-speech","tag-frieze-new-york-2026","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny","tag-sound-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229129\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/229130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}