Oliver Beer (British, born 1985) creates sculptures, paintings, installations, videos, and immersive live performances that reveal the hidden properties of objects, bodies, and architectural sites. His social and familial relationships often serve as the blueprint for multidisciplinary works that engage with both intimate and universal concerns, such as the transmission of musical memories and the personal and cultural meanings embedded in the objects we possess. In his Resonance Project (2007‒), vocal performances activate the natural harmonics of built structures, forging a visceral connection between the audience and interior space. Beer’s Resonance Paintings are made with the vibration of sound waves on canvas, visually manifesting the unseen harmonics that surround us. His video works similarly explore these themes by weaving together fragmented moments and perspectives, creating immersive experiences at the convergence of audio and visual perception.

The artist’s work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions, notably at Met Breuer, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and MoMA PS1 in New York; London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE in London; Centre Pompidou, Opéra Garnier, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Palais de Tokyo, and Château de Versailles in Paris; the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon; Ikon Gallery in Birmingham; WIELS in Brussels; and at the Sydney, Istanbul, and Venice biennales. Beer was featured in the British Art Show 9 and has held residencies at Villa Albertine, Palais de Tokyo, the Watermill Center, Sydney Opera House, and Fondation Hermès. He studied musical composition at the Academy of Contemporary Music in London, visual art at the University of Oxford, and cinema theory at the Sorbonne in Paris. His upcoming shows include a major new immersive video opera at the Lyon Biennial and a solo exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris.

HOW IS YOUR WORK INFLUENCED BY THE CIRCA 2024 MANIFESTO?
“We exist inside this uncanny loop: forever returning, forever moving forward”…

The aim of this Reanimation film was to encourage unrestricted creative expression, liberating the artistic process from the cultural tropes and stereotypes that often shape our perceptions. Inspired by Disney’s 1938 Snow White, which was animated at 12 frames per second, I worked with approximately 500 unique images from a 40-second sequence. I extracted and printed each frame onto A4 paper and sent them, along with tracing paper and instructions, to 500 children in schools across southeastern France.

The children’s reinterpretations resulted in a vibrant and diverse array of drawings: Snow White appears in colors ranging from pink and purple to black and blue, sometimes adorned with stripes, spots, horns, wings, or even patriotic flags. I printed their drawings back onto 16mm film at 12 images per second. The outcome is a hallucinatory, quivering animation that, despite the immense variety between each frame and the richness of subliminal imagery, retains the movement, forms, and rhythms of the original Disney masterpiece.

As we watch, we can still recognise the familiar scenes—birds flying, squirrels fleeing, and the horror on Snow White’s face as she confronts the Queen—while simultaneously witnessing the passage of 500 unique artistic perspectives.

WHAT WOULD YOU CREATE/DO WITH THE £30K CIRCA PRIZE?
The 10-minute film will be an ambitious new collective Reanimation, exploring the concept of creative and cognitive development by gradually increasing the age of participating children throughout an animation sequence. This project will involve around 1,000 children, aged 0 to 16, drawn from London as well as from the cities that have participated in CIRCA around the world since its inception. The children will work on an animation sequence chosen specially for its intrinsic relevance to children across different cultures. These young artists will be organised by increasing age, each tasked with redrawing and reinterpreting a single frame in the same order as it appears in the animation.

The film will begin with the nebulous, abstract scribbles of infants, gradually transitioning into more recognisable forms as the seconds pass and the ages incrementally progress. As the children’s visual and motor skills develop, the animation will reach a kind of ghostly clarity with the contributions of young adults at the sequence’s end.

Presented on the CIRCA screens, this evolving imagery will envelop viewers in a psychedelic, hypnotic display, revealing a thousand young imaginations flickering and evolving above us. The soundtrack, much like in Reanimation (Snow White), will be carefully crafted to deepen and enhance the resonance of the visual experience.

FOLLOW OLIVER BEER ON INSTAGRAM