And they call it present

Playback machines are wound up, and unstable apparitions of light and sound emerge in this new performance by Icaro Zorbar.

Every recording begins with the promise that something might outlast the moment from which it came. A voice becomes a trace. A gesture settles into matter. Vibrations find a surface on which to remain.

Yet recordings never simply preserve. They continue to change. Every playback alters what is heard; every encounter leaves another trace. Time keeps working long after the event itself has disappeared.

For more than two decades, Zorbar has built what he calls assisted installations. These delicate set-ups of analog machines, sound, light and living matter depend on human care, their duration brief and finite, like a music box that must be wound before it can play. Nothing runs entirely on its own.

And they call it present, built from objects, gestures, recordings and spoken reflections, brings this practice to Astrup Fearnley Museet. Through a careful sequence of activations, Zorbar gradually composes an environment in which each action subtly transforms the next. What appears exists only briefly, whether as a voice and its echo, a repetition, or an interruption.

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• Icaro Zorbar is a Colombian artist based in Oslo. His work has been presented internationally, including at the São Paulo Biennial, the Lyon Biennale, the Modern Art Museum of Bogotá, Kunsthalle Osnabrück and the MUNCH Triennale.
• Zorbar compares the duration of his assisted installations to the frame around a painting: the mechanism defines the work’s temporal limits, unfolding only once activated, and only for as long as it can run.
• On his fascination with what resists being captured, he says: ‘I do believe in ghosts. But my ghost is subtly different from the terrifying beings of the movies. My ghost is an unstable presence, an apparition; something momentarily seen and closely linked with light itself, and also with sound, as a specter. My devices are like channels that facilitate appearances.’