Clinamen by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot turns water and ceramic bowls into sound
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot brings the aquatic sound installation Clinamen to the Wade Thompson Drill Hall at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. On view from June 10 to August 2, 2026, the project is presented as the largest iteration of the artist’s ongoing work to date. The installation fills the monumental hall with circular basins of water, drifting ceramic bowls and a live composition shaped by chance, movement and sound.
Boursier-Mougenot has long worked between art, music and composition, creating systems in which everyday objects become instruments. His installations do not rely on performers in the conventional sense. Instead, they create situations where sound is produced through simple physical conditions: contact, vibration, air, water and time. In Clinamen, the score is not written on a page, but generated through the slow and unpredictable movement of objects within the space.
The installation is composed of water-filled circular basins where ceramic bowls float freely. Selected for their timbre and capacity to drift, the bowls are moved by a light current, gently colliding with one another as they travel across the surface. Each contact produces a clear chiming sound, creating a composition that is never repeated in the same way. The work makes its own music in front of the audience, allowing visitors to see the mechanism of sound as they listen to it.
The title Clinamen refers to the unpredictable motion of atoms, a concept that gives the work its philosophical and structural basis. Nothing in the installation is entirely fixed. The rhythm of the bowls, the spacing of their collisions and the resonance of the ceramic objects change continuously. The result is a musical environment that develops without direction, conductor or predetermined sequence, shaped instead by movement, accident and the conditions of the room.
Inside the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, the work gains a new architectural scale, joining landmark New York public art interventions such as the 2,977 Lights memorial above New York Harbor in engaging the emotional atmosphere of the city. The vast interior of the Armory allows the installation to unfold as both a visual field and a listening environment, where sound travels through the hall and changes according to distance and position. Visitors can move around the basins, pause at their edges or experience the work collectively as a shared acoustic atmosphere. The installation asks for attention rather than interpretation, slowing the encounter with sound into an experience of duration.
Clinamen also extends Boursier-Mougenot’s interest in the boundary between art and everyday life. The bowls remain recognisable as ordinary objects, yet their function is transformed by water, drift and contact. Their movement is modest, almost casual, but the sounds they produce create a delicate and constantly renewing composition. The work turns simple materials into a living system, where the smallest physical event becomes audible.
clinamen (v.11) 2026, Exhibition view at Park Avenue Armory © Céleste Boursier-Mougenot/ADAGP | Photo: Nicholas Knight
