Make your presence known
Sound installation, PARABOL at Kunsthall 3,14, Bergen, Norway, 2024
‘Make your presence known’ asks how a presence might be sensed without being seen. Bringing together sound and an AI-generated image, the work evokes an unseen but audible presence — somewhere between imagined encounter, technological mediation and haunting.
The work takes as a point of departure the Fox sisters, whose nineteenth-century séances became closely associated with the rise of modern Spiritualism. Their communication with supposed spirits occurred through mysterious raps and knocks: sounds presented as evidence of an invisible presence. In Nel’s work, this history is reconfigured through a soundscape created with knuckle bones, while an AI-generated image depicts hands gathered around a table in séance.
Both sound and image are therefore mediated constructions of something absent. Rather than offering evidence of a supernatural presence, the work considers how bodies, technologies and acts of belief can produce the conditions through which a presence is imagined, projected or sensed.
Make your presence known was presented as part of PARABOL, a collaboration between Lydgalleriet and Kunsthall 3,14 in Bergen. Played through a directional loudspeaker in the entrance hall, the sound work became the visitor’s first encounter with the exhibition space.