The short version
- Yuko Mohri’s “In Concert” is at The Curve in London’s Barbican Centre until January 24, 2027, and admission is free.
- The installation combines everyday objects with magnetism, humidity, air, water and gravity, so the room’s own conditions help decide what it sounds like.
- The Barbican’s page does not say how loud or how continuous the sound is, so we cannot yet tell you what an hour inside is like.
London has two large sound installations this autumn. Tarek Atoui’s Turbine Hall commission opens at Tate Modern on October 13. The other has been running since October 1: Yuko Mohri’s “In Concert,” in The Curve at the Barbican Centre, on until January 24, 2027. Admission is free. The gallery is open Tuesday to Sunday, 11:00 to 19:00, and closed on Mondays and from December 24 to 26.
Mohri builds from ordinary things. The Barbican lists umbrellas, feather dusters, apples and xylophones, combined with what it calls “unstable elements”: magnetism, humidity, air, water and gravity. The result is an installation of light, sound and kinetic sculpture that takes in objects from the Barbican itself and responds to the atmospheric conditions of the gallery. If humidity and air are among the players, the piece on a damp afternoon is not quite the piece on a dry one.
The Barbican frames the work around flux and repair, entropy and renewal, and ties it to the building’s own renovation. It quotes Alexander Leissle of ArtReview describing Mohri’s work as “a faulty, disjointed, orchestrated but never really controllable network of things in disrepair.”
The venue’s page gives no account of how loud the installation is or how continuous its sound.
