Christopher Steenson - Listening Across Tenses

For this iteration of the Listening Group, artist Christopher Steenson shares a series of sound-based artworks he has created over the past five years. These works, which range from public sound interventions using public infrastructures to fictional broadcasts and site-specific installations, use sound and listening as a conduit for exploring speculative pasts and futures. Steenson explores the relationship between sound, place and memory as a method for communing and imagining within broader social and political contexts of ecological and social rupture.

These works will include Steenson's national public sound artwork, On Chorus (2020), Soft Rains Will Come (2022), and Let it run all over me (2023), as well as new work in progress. He will also touch upon key historical works of experimental sound practice that have been formative to the development of his practice as an artist, including the work of Alvin Lucier, John Cage, Max Neuhaus and Luc Ferrari.

Biography
Spanning sound, lens-based media, text and digital systems, Christopher Steenson’s (b.1992) practice seeks to find ways in which we can ‘listen to the future’, by bridging historical and speculative narratives that interrogate the politics of time, environment and more-than-human-relations.

Drawing upon the open methodologies of John Cage, and the idea of ‘correspondences’ proposed by anthropologist Tim Ingold, Steenson’s artworks manifest themselves under various guises, ranging from multifaceted installations and sound works, to site-specific projects that operate within and through public space and infrastructure. Through these means, Steenson’s work attempts to function as a collaborative process, unfolding as a field of potentialities between viewers and (speculative) environments.

By conjuring fictions, folklores and alternative temporalities, Steenson’s work ultimately strives to locate audiences within a ‘dreamtime’ space, in which pasts, presents and futures are negotiated on a continuum. In this sense, his practice can be seen as a capsule for ‘quantum listening’. As artist and researcher Mark Peter Wright remarks: “Steenson’s artworks correspond with the mutability of sound and space, to oneself and a contingent time to come. They are invitations to listen elsewhere whilst simultaneously sounding the present.”

Recent presentations include: 'mother tongue', The MAC, Belfast (2024); 'inching towards', Freelands Foundation, London (2024); ‘Penumbra’, LAVA, Mexico City (2024); 'Breath Variations’, Flat Time House, London (2023); ‘The Sky is Falling!’, Ormston House, Limerick (2024); 'Soft Rains Will Come', VISUAL Carlow (2022); TULCA Festival of Visual Arts: The World Was All Before Them (2022). 

In 2020, Steenson presented ‘On Chorus’ a national public sound artwork utilising Ireland’s network of train station PA systems. His work is held in the Arts Council of Ireland Collection.