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The highlight of Kiasma’s autumn season is Oliver Beer – Resonance Project: The Cave, an immersive installation that transforms the museum’s top floor into a prehistoric cave filled with sound. The work will be on display from 6 November 2026 to 28 March 2027.
Inspired by the ancient cave paintings of Font-de-Gaume in south-western France, the installation by British artist Oliver Beer brings the atmosphere and extraordinary acoustics of a prehistoric cave to life inside the museum.
A contemporary art museum is a surprisingly fitting home for prehistoric cave paintings. Despite the thousands of years separating them, prehistoric art often feels remarkably modern in its simplicity of expression.
Beer was granted rare permission to work and film inside Font-de-Gaume, an archaeologically significant cave famous for its hundreds of prehistoric paintings, created more than 15,000 years ago. Caves of this kind are generally closed to visitors to protect their fragile artwork.
But it's not just the paintings that make Font-de-Gaume remarkable. The cave also has extraordinary acoustics. While studying the space, Beer discovered that the strongest resonance occurred in the areas with the greatest concentration of paintings. Singing a low F note caused the cave to vibrate, amplifying the sound many times over.
For the installation, Beer invited eight musicians to take part: Rufus Wainwright, Woodkid, eee gee, Mélissa Laveaux, Hamed Sinno, Jean Christophe Brizard, Mo'Jun and Michiko Takahashi. Each performs the earliest song they can remember from childhood. Beer then arranged these melodies, passed down through generations, into a new, multi-layered vocal composition.
The installation features 16 audio channels and eight video projections, carefully arranged so that the singers’ voices resonate together, recreating the sensation of being inside a real prehistoric cave – a place that very few people ever get to experience.
Beer's previous works have been exhibited at major international venues, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Venice Biennale.