Direct Bodily Empathy – Sensing Sound

The exhibition spans sonic structures and resonant objects, graphic scores and visual music, tangible motion sculptures and kinetic installations, architectural soundings, experimental films, composition, and choreography.

Taking a polyphonic approach, Direct Bodily Empathy places leading twentieth-century artist Len Lye in concert with his contemporaries, elaborating on these historical echoes through new commissions and recent works by Aotearoa and international contemporary artists. Leading out a two-part exhibition programme, Sensing Sound asks: Can architecture be a musical score? Can the body be an instrument? Can colour be heard? How does this move us?

Curated to celebrate the tenth anniversary year of the Len Lye Centre, the exhibition includes A Score for the Len Lye Centre, where artist composer Mia Salsjö has transposed the shimmering architectural contours of the art museum into a musical score. This composition will be performed by an ensemble of musicians from the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra led by conductor Hamish McKeich on August 30 and displayed as a sound installation from September 6 as part of an evolving performance programme.

Performance programme below.

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Performance Programme

Direct Bodily Empathy – Sensing Sound is enlivened by an evolving performance series across the exhibition’s duration spanning choreography, performance, sound installations and kinetic sculpture.

Mel O’Callaghan, First sound, last sound (2022-2025)
Performances: 11 am every Saturday, 17 May – 23 August (except 14 June) | 20 minutes | Free

Come and witness First sound, last sound, a profound sensory performance that calls your body into deep resonance with the living frequency of the Earth. As local performers activate towering tuning forks tuned to the ‘god note’—256 hertz—you’ll be immersed in sympathetic vibration that echoes within your own breath and heartbeat. This is sound not just heard, but felt—cellular, primal, and ancient. Join us and become part of the transmission.

Mia Salsjö with musicians from the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, A Score for the Len Lye Centre (2025)
Performances: 11:00am, 1:00pm, 2:30pm, Saturday 30 August | 20 minutes | Free 

Sound installation: hourly on the hour, 6 September – 16 March 2026.

For the tenth anniversary, artist and composer Mia Salsjö has transposed the shimmering architectural contours of our art museum into a musical score. This unfolding new commission made possible by the Govett-Brewster Foundation can first be experienced as an expansive installation of graphic scores from May, a performance by musicians from the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra in August, a site-specific sound installation on display from September.

A Score for the Len Lye Centre is composed for thirteen stringed instruments, with a synthesiser playing samples of recordings Lye made in the 1960s of his kinetics performing. Lye correlated his sculptures with musical instruments, leaving their auditory traces in the Len Lye Foundation Archive for the then unknowable composers of the future to use.

Len Lye Wand Dance (1965 / 2018)
Performances: twice hourly every day, 6 September – 23 November 2025

When activated by electrical energy, Wand Dance is one of Lye’s most entrancing kinetic installations. Composed of seven dancing 3-metre fibreglass wands topped with orbiting brass bells, the work evolves through choreographed ‘figures of motion’. As forms of energy made visible, these ephemeral volumes of light in space reveal the language of acoustics and physics—as underpinned by harmonic waves. 

Ross Manning Spectra V (2012)
Performances: continuous 18 May – 23 November 2025

Spectra V is a suspended kinetic sculpture which imbues the gallery walls with shifting chromatic washes of colour. Both affecting and sensorial, it produces an immersive experience for audiences on a somatic level, playing with ocular perception. Like an autonomous musical instrument performing aerial ballet to its own hidden optical soundtrack.

Len Lye Universe (1963-76/1998), Blade (1959-1976), Watusi (1960 /2018)
Performances: all day everyday, 6 December – 16 March 2026

Universe, Watusi, and Blade, could be read not only as kinetic sculptures, but as musical instruments, with each programmed sculpture performing a unique composition of motion and sound. Lye riffed with steel, exploiting its undulating wave forms, sonic frequencies, and light-reflective properties. His sculptures are energetic systems in themselves, enacting a relational transmutation of energy and feedback between sculptural objects and bodies in a shared vibration.