Beer, Oliver
Oliver Beer’s musical background is a central influence on his film, installation, sculpture and performance. Working with found objects and sounds, as well as with his own compositions, the artist explores how the world exists across senses and forms. He is interested in the hidden acoustic properties of bodies and architectural environments as well as the sounds and memories contained within personal possessions.
For Reanimation (I Wan’na be Like You), 2017, Beer orchestrates the retelling of a scene from Walt Disney’s Jungle Book of 1967. With the support of Ikon Gallery, he worked with 2,500 children from Birmingham, who each drew and reinterpreted one of the 2,500 frames used to animate the song of the title. He then spliced together the frames, which were assigned in order of age, so that the drawings evolve from the faint lines and crumpled paper of infants into lucid pictures by adolescents. The work includes a soundtrack composed from all the languages into which the film has been dubbed. From French to Finnish, the sound flickers through these recordings, speaking to the ubiquity and universality of the cartoon.
- Artwork Details: running time: 3 minutes 23seconds
- Edition: 2 of 3 + 2 AP
- Material description: Digitised animation Video/16mm film, colour
- Credit line: © the artist. Image courtesy of the artist and Thaddaeus Ropac, London. Gift of the artist, 2021
- Theme:
- Medium: Film and Audio Visual
- Accession number: ACC7/2020