Over the past two decades, Susan Philipsz’s work has explored the sculptural and emotional qualities of sound, creating subtle resonances between past and present. Intended for both indoor and outdoor spaces, The Cuckoo's Nest is presented here in the garden of the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, after being created in a room at the Isabelle Bortolozzi gallery in Berlin and then installed in the Sapporo Art Park, a sculpture garden on the island of Hokkaido, Japan.

Six speakers arranged in a circle play the voice of artist and singer Susan Philipsz, who sings “a cappella” the six parts of a thirteenth-century English madrigal, “Sumer is icumen in” – which could be translated as “Summer has arrived”. Written in Middle English, this canon can be performed by four or six voices, depending on the vertical arrangement of the original score, with the different parts following each other continuously. Its “instructions”, which appear on the wall label, begin with the words: “Four companions may sing this round, but not less than three.” It is a canon, a polyphonic (and contrapuntal) form in which the melody sung by the first voice is then imitated by the others, each entering at a later time until they all overlap. For The Cuckoo’s Nest, Susan Philipsz recorded all the parts herself and projected them through six speakers, each corresponding to one of the voices in the round, taking the principle of imitation to its extreme. The text celebrates the arrival of the new season, inviting the cuckoo to sing and buds to blossom. The circumstances in which this piece was originally sung remain unknown, but it clearly had a ritual and collective dimension. Here, the work evokes a folk dance, the sound of which invites us to move around the exhibition space.

Bastien Gallet, 2025