Public Art Fund Talks at The New School: Susan Philipsz

Berlin-based artist Susan Philipsz (b. Glasgow, UK, 1965) is best known for her ethereal sound installations featuring songs ranging from folk ballads to pop music, often sung a cappella in the artist’s own voice. Her site-specific works combine references to history, literature, and popular and folk music to create visual, aural, and emotive landscapes. Mediating public spaces with sound that streams from strategically placed speakers, her audio installations layer seemingly nondescript sites such as a train station or parking lot, with the intimacy of the human voice. On the occasion of her recent exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Philipsz stated: “against the backdrop of the modernist architecture of the city I see the voice as a means to infiltrate spaces, like a ghost in the machine, and return experience to a human scale.”