Allard van Hoorn

055 Urban Songline (Static Generator) | Latitude: 54.902386° N – 54.902892° N / Longitude: 23.916612° E – 23.917294° E. 2017

Christ’s Resurrection Church, Žemaičių g. 31A, Kaunas
15.00–15.15

Church roof terrace
I–V 12.00–18.00
VI–VII 11.00–18.00

Sound installation 

Christ’s Resurrection Church in Kaunas, an impressive specimen of modernist architecture, was conceived in the 1920s as a monument to the resurrection of the Lithuanian nation and the regained independence of the Lithuanian state. The idea attracted criticism on the grounds that a monument to Independence should be for all, without emphasis on one religion, language or political views. After a lot of modifications the project went ahead, however, the construction was not finished before Soviet Russia occupied Lithuania, and only reached completion after the Independence of 1990. During the Soviet occupation the building was turned into a radio factory. At the same time the Soviets installed 26 jamming masts in Kaunas alone to disrupt incoming radio-signals from the West and to stop the stations like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe broadcasting to the occupied people of Eastern Europe.

The Resurrection Church building itself looks like an Art Deco radio, a stern, boxy grid of modernist lines. For the duration of the 11th Kaunas Biennial, Allard van Hoorn turns the Church into half radio, half jamming tower, disrupting its monumental purity with his sound intervention of “no signal” static, jammed signal, and other idiosyncratic radio phenomena, as well as the recordings of the 26 “nobody’s” tiles in Unity Square, as a reminder of the fragility of freedom – freedom of speech in particular.