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      Press Release

      Immersive biodiversity exhibition extended due to popular demand

      Released April 21, 2022

      The Great Animal Orchestra, a collaboration between Bernie Krause and United Visual Artists, now on view through July 10, 2022

      SALEM, MA – The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain are proud to announce a seven-week extension of the North American premiere of The Great Animal Orchestra, a collaborative work between pioneer soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause and United Visual Artists. Due to the overwhelming popularity, the exhibition will remain on view at PEM through July 10, 2022.

      Over the course of nearly 50 years, Bernie Krause collected more than 5,000 hours of recordings of natural environments, including at least 15,000 terrestrial and marine species from around the world. Museum visitors can step into an immersive audio-visual experience that celebrates our planet’s rich biodiversity and raises awareness of its alarming decline. Along with the installation, a new documentary about Bernie Krause, directed by French filmmaker Vincent Tricon and produced by Fondation Cartier, is part of PEM’s exhibition presentation.

      Bernie Krause’s research offers a wonderful immersion into the sound universe of animals, otherwise known as biophony. Before developing a passion for recording wild soundscapes, Krause worked as a musician and sound designer in the 1960s and 1970s, collaborating with artists like The Doors and Van Morrison. Krause listens to animal vocalizations with a musician’s ear and studies his field recordings from the perspective of a scientist. He has become a master in the art of revealing the beauty, diversity and complexity of the languages of wild animals, increasingly silenced by the din and intrusion of human activity. In the 1970s, Krause recorded soundscapes across North America, Latin America, Kenya, Rwanda and Zimbabwe, as well as a collage of soundscapes from the depths of the world’s oceans. In recent years, he has returned to these exact sites only to find that more than 50% of the recorded biodiversity has been lost. This unique installation thus makes a plea for preserving the wondrous diversity of the animal world. Krause implores us to listen to these voices from the living, non-human world before they are forever silenced.

      To produce The Great Animal Orchestra, Krause collaborated with United Visual Artists (UVA), a London-based art practice led by Matt Clark, whose installations and collaborations integrate new technologies and traditional media. UVA developed computer software that creates extraordinarily detailed, immersive, animated spectrograms generated by Krause’s soundscapes to form a visual interpretation of the various global locations and times of day that Krause’s original recordings were made. In this environment, we are guided into the interrelationship of the many species performing in the world’s great animal orchestras.

      PUBLICITY IMAGES
      High-resolution images and captions are available upon request.

      SOCIAL MEDIA
      Share your impressions on social media using #TheGreatAnimalOrchestra and #PEMClimate

      EXHIBITION CREDIT
      The Great Animal Orchestra
      , a collaboration between Bernie Krause and United Visual Artists, was commissioned in 2016 by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, and is now part of its permanent collection. The exhibition is organized by the Peabody Essex Museum and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain.

      The exhibition is presented as part of PEM’s Climate + Environment Initiative and is made possible by a generous gift from the Creighton family and the Albert M. Creighton III Fund for Art and Nature. Additional support was provided by Peter and Sandra Lawrence and individuals who support the Exhibition Incubation Fund: Jennifer and Andrew Borggaard, James B. and Mary Lou Hawkes, Kate and Ford O'Neil, and Henry and Callie Brauer. We also recognize the generosity of the East India Marine Associates of the Peabody Essex Museum.

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      MEDIA PARTNERS

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      IMAGE CREDIT
      Bernie Krause and United Visual Artists, The Great Animal Orchestra, 2016. Multimedia installation, 1 h 32. Collection Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (acq. 2017). View of the exhibition. The Great Animal Orchestra, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, 2016. © Bernie Krause © United Visual Artists. Photo: © Luc Boegly.

      PUBLICATIONS
      The following publications are available for purchase in the PEM Shop:

      • The Fondation Cartier’s The Great Animal Orchestra website was conceived in 2016 upon the exhibition’s debut and is dedicated to the work of Bernie Krause, allowing visitors to become their own conductor of nature’s vast musical ensemble.
      • The exhibition is accompanied by a book about UVA, Other Spaces, published by The Store X The Vinyl Factory in 2019, as well as a book about the collaboration behind The Great Animal Orchestra, with the contributions of Bernie Krause, Matthew Clark, Gilles Boeuf, Michel André and Hans Ulrich Obrist, published by the Fondation Cartier.
      • Released on vinyl for the first time by The Store X The Vinyl Factory and Fondation Cartier, Bernie Krause’s soundtrack has been pressed onto two 180-gram heavyweight records, housed in a bespoke gatefold sleeve featuring installation imagery and graphics with informational inner sleeves and inserts about the recordings and the environments in which they were captured.
      • Bernie Krause’s new book The Power of Tranquility in a Very Noisy World (2021) addresses the noise and chaos that compete for every moment of our attention. Just as some influencers inspire us to tidy up household clutter, The Power of Tranquility takes personal organization a step further – into the sonic realm. Krause shares tips to identify and reduce the damaging aural assaults that besiege us, the incoherent dissonance that impacts our health more than we may realize.


      ABOUT FONDATION CARTIER POUR L’ART CONTEMPORAIN
      The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain is a private cultural institution whose mission is to promote all fields of contemporary artistic creation to the international public through a program of temporary exhibitions, live performances and lectures. Created in 1984 by the Maison Cartier, the historic institution is located in Paris in a building designed by the architect Jean Nouvel. Fostering surprising and unexpected encounters between artists, scientists, philosophers, musicians and architects from around the world, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain has over the years developed a program of distinctive contemporary art exhibitions on subjects ranging from science to cinema, dance to design, and has built a unique collection that brings together more than 2,000 works by 500 artists of 50 different nationalities.

      For more than two decades, the Fondation Cartier has engaged in projects that examine and address the most urgent issues facing the environment, animal life and indigenous peoples. Full exhibitions, individual works of art, publications, performances and public talks, have explored the devastating effect of human intervention, industrialization, and colonization on the natural world. Exhibitions such as Yanomami, Spirit of the Forest (2003), Native Land, Stop Eject (2008), Exit (2008–ongoing), The Great Animal Orchestra (2016) and Trees (2019) explore the Fondation’s commitment to contemporary ecological questions and the role of humans in the living world.

      In recent years the Fondation has initiated partnerships with major international institutions, organizing exhibitions in Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Seoul, Milan and Shanghai. The presentation of The Great Animal Orchestra in partnership with the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, marks the museum’s first exhibition partnership in the United States in more than 20 years.

      ABOUT BERNIE KRAUSE
      Since 1968, Bernie Krause has traveled the world recording and archiving the sounds of creatures and environments large and small. Working at the research sites of Jane Goodall (Gombe, Tanzania), Biruté Galdikas (Camp Leakey, Borneo), and Dian Fossey (Karisoke, Rwanda), he identified the concept of biophony based on the relationships of individual creatures to the total biological soundscape as each establishes frequency and/or temporal bandwidth within a given habitat. His contributions helped establish the foundation of a new bioacoustic discipline: soundscape ecology. Krause has produced over 50 natural soundscape albums in addition to the design of interactive, non-redundant environmental sound sculptures for museums and other public spaces throughout the world. His installations can be experienced at the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC), the California Academy of Sciences (San Francisco), the Houston Museum of Natural Science, the Chicago Science Museum, the American Museum of Natural History (New York City), five special commissions at the World Financial Center (New York City) and more than 30 other venues across North America and Europe.

      ABOUT UNITED VISUAL ARTISTS
      United Visual Artists (UVA) is a London-based collective founded in 2003 by British artist Matt Clark. Its diverse body of work integrates new technologies with traditional media such as sculpture, performance and site-specific installation. Drawing from sources ranging from ancient philosophy to theoretical science, the practice explores the cultural frameworks and natural phenomena that shape our cognition, creating instruments that manipulate our perception and expose the relativity of our experiences. Rather than material objects, UVA’s works are better understood as events in time in which the performance of light, sound and movement unfolds. UVA has been commissioned internationally by institutions including the Barbican Curve Gallery (London), Manchester International Festival (Manchester, England), Royal Academy of Arts (London); Serpentine Gallery (London); The Wellcome Trust (London), Towner Gallery (East Sussex, England), Victoria & Albert Museum (London), Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, (Paris), YCAM (Tokyo) and others. Previous group exhibitions include Blain|Southern (London), Riflemaker (London), Bryce Wolkowitz (New York) Seoul Museum of Art and Power Station of Art (Shanghai).

      ABOUT THE PEABODY ESSEX MUSEUM
      Over the last 20 years, the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) has distinguished itself as one of the fastest-growing art museums in North America. Founded in 1799, it is also the country’s oldest continuously operating museum. At its heart is a mission to enrich and transform people's lives by broadening their perspectives, attitudes, and knowledge of themselves and the wider world. PEM celebrates outstanding artistic and cultural creativity through exhibitions, programming, and community and virtual events that emphasize cross-cultural connections, integrate past and present, and underscore the vital importance of creative expression. The museum's collection is among the finest of its kind, with superlative works from around the globe and across time — including American art and architecture, fashion and design, photography, and African, Asian, contemporary, maritime, Native American, and Oceanic art, as well as one of the nation’s most important museum-based collections of rare books and manuscripts. PEM's campus offers a varied and unique visitor experience with hands-on creativity zones, interactive opportunities and performance spaces. Twenty-two noted historic structures grace PEM’s campus, including Yin Yu Tang, a 200-year-old Chinese house that is the only such example of Chinese domestic architecture on display in the United States. HOURS: Open Thursdays-Sundays and holiday Mondays, 10 am-5 pm and Fridays 10 am–7 pm. Closed Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day. ADMISSION: Adults $20; seniors $18; students $12. Additional admission to Yin Yu Tang: $6 (plus museum admission). Members, youth 16 and under, and residents of Salem enjoy free general admission and free admission to Yin Yu Tang. INFO: Call 866-745-1876 or visit pem.org.

      MEDIA CONTACTS
      Whitney Van Dyke | Director of Marketing & Communications | whitney_vandyke@pem.org | 978-542-1828
      Amelia Kantrovitz | Publicist, PEM | amelia_kantrovitz@pem.org | 617-794-4964
      Katie Zoni | Public Relations, Cartier North America | katie.zoni@cartier.com | 347-218-0874