The short version
- Justin Caguiat’s show at Serpentine South in London includes bronze bells cast as flowers and seeds and struck by pistons in a continuous loop.
- The score borrows from change ringing, an English tradition from the 16th century in which bells are rung in shifting orders instead of tunes.
- The show is free and runs until January 10, 2027, and the gallery has not said how many bells there are.
At Serpentine South in Kensington Gardens, a set of bronze bells cast in the shapes of flowers and plant seeds is ringing by machine. Pistons strike them in a coded sequence that loops continuously, following a score by the composer Lily Pickett that, in the gallery’s words, “riffs on the logic of English change ringing.” The bells are part of Change Ringing, the first institutional exhibition in the UK by Justin Caguiat, a painter born in Tokyo in 1989. It opened October 8 and runs to January 10, 2027. Admission is free, Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 to 18:00.
Change ringing is a peculiarly English way of making music with no melody. It began in the 16th century, when church bells were first hung on full wheels and ringers gained control over the order in which they sounded. Since then the art has been to keep changing the order in which a set of bells strikes, each new order called a row or a change, following a fixed scheme the ringers call a method. What you hear is a pattern being worked through.
The room is part of the instrument. The gallery says its walls “gather and amplify the bells’ chimes, transforming architecture into a listening instrument,” and compares the effect to the acoustic mirrors on Britain’s coast. Around the bells hang paintings in heat-sensitive pigment that change color with the temperature. The gallery does not say how many bells there are or how long the loop lasts.
It is a good month for listening in London: Tarek Atoui’s Turbine Hall commission opens today at Tate Modern.
