TESTIMONIUM - LISBOA
at Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, Portugal

"...Sound art that works with residues does not redeem them nor aestheticise them complacently; on the contrary, it exposes their persistence and their capacity to affect. By amplifying the noises of corroded structures or making audible frequencies that escape common perception, the artist shifts the viewer into a position of perceptual responsibility. Listening becomes an act of recognising what has been discarded.
In truth, it is not a matter of representing the environmental crisis, but of producing an experience in which the listener’s own body is traversed by vibrations that refer to contemporary excess. Sound art thus operates as a phenomenology of residue: it makes one feel the temporal density of that which persists. If consumer society tends to erase its traces, the listening proposed by Kirkegaard reinscribes them in the domain of the sensible."
From Contemporañea's Isabel Nogueira's review of 'Testimonium Lisboa'.

Testimonium is an immersive, multichannel sound installation series by the Danish artist Jacob Kirkegaard. The work invites visitors to listen to waste and to sense the sound texture of waste as it reveals its invisible pulsations.
The project is part of ‘(de)composition’, a sound art programme curated by Raquel Castro that emerges as an artistic response to the growing waste crisis, inviting the public to reflect on human existence in a world of consumption and discarding.

Jacob Kirkegaard's work Testimonium explores not just physical waste, but also everything that it symbolises: excessive consumption, social invisibility (the waste itself and those who deal with it are frequently ignored) and the urgent need for a shift in mindsets. The title plays with the tension between composition – which combines and organises elements – and decomposition – which disintegrates and transmutes. The work allows us to hear the physical and choreographed essence of everything we throw away. It captures sounds and vibrations from plastics, glass, metals and wastewater with sensors, hydrophones and microphones tuned into the din produced by these materials. The result is a rich and moving portrait of the detritus of modern civilisation – an astonishing testimony of that which is abandoned and, sometimes, recovered.
The Testimonium project has recorded waste streams and their management systems in countries including Denmark, Latvia, Estonia, Greenland, Greece, South Africa and Kenya, exploring landfills, recycling centres and wastewater.

In Portugal, the series continues titled Testimonium - Lisbon. It listens to the way of the waste in the Portuguese capital, its massive and pulsating machinery that aims to carry the waste out of sight, smell and mind.

On 31 January, there will be a conversation between the artist and the curator Raquel Castro, followed by a live performance of a new work by Jacob Kirkegaard played live in collaboration with Portuguese flutist Clara Saleiro.

Opening of installation with live performance: 31 jan 2026
Period 31 Jan – 18 May 2026
Location: Sound Room at Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian

Review of Testimonium Lisboa HERE.

SKYWAVE

Skywave is a new sound work that I've composed from shortwave radio transmissions: number station broadcasts of morse sequences, coded voices, and the noise that exists between frequencies. These transmissions are not merely relics of the past; they remain active today. Once used to transmit covert messages across borders, shortwave still serves as a discreet channel for communication among states and intelligence networks.

In a time marked by renewed geopolitical tension and digital vulnerability, one-way broadcasts persist as a resilient and untraceable form of transmission. Skywave offers a contemporary listening to this ongoing phenomenon, tracing its quiet persistence in the shadows of global communication. The work emerges from the raw materiality of shortwave itself: the hum, static, drifting tones, and subtle interference between signals, that I captured through an array of my analogue shortwave radios and digital sources.

Since I first encountered shortwave at the age of nine, I have spent countless nights recording its transmissions, drawn to the sound of other worlds and the almost musical qualities embedded within the noise. Skywave extends my lifelong fascination, serving as both continuation and homage to a medium that has profoundly shaped my approach to sound.

Skywave, 34 minutes © Jacob Kirkegaard, 2025.
Commissioned by Studio Akustische Kunst, WDR.
Online on WDR website for 1 year from 2th of Feb 2026.
Live broadcast on 27th of March 2026 at 11:05 PM CET.

Listen to Skywave HERE.

Photo above: Unknown. Found by Kirkegaard in the 90s

HYPOGEUM

Hypogeum is a new work that takes the listener on a journey in sound through the colossal Copenhagen sewer system. It is composed of sound recordings that I made of sewer pipes, storm water tunnels, pump stations, and majestic cistern-like water reservoirs. The work reveals a vast and complex underground infrastructure, that is vital to the life and health of the city.
I will present this work in public for the first time as as part of Copenhagen Architecture Biennial (CAFx) as a 32-channel sound installation at the Lydbrøndene sound system at Bent Fabricius-Bjerres Plads in Frederiksberg, Copenhagen.
Dates: Opening of multi-channel installation on Sept 21st at 4:30pm. After the 21st Hypogeum runs every day for 30 minutes starting at 5:30 pm until the end of the festival on Oct 19.
Additional presentation and talk at Gloria cinema on Sept 28th
Read here.


The Gallows Hill, Ribe. Jacob Kirkegaard, 1991


The Gallows Hill, Ribe. Jacob Kirkegaard, 2025

VANITAS - Fantasies of Grandeur

Rued Langgaard Festival, Ribe, DK
Vanitas - Fantasies of Grandeur is a new work for field recordings and cello that I have composed together with cellist and composer Jakob Kullberg. While it builds on the main theme in Rued Langgaard's opera Antichrist, it works with sound recordings that I recorded at the gallows hill (Galgebakken) in Ribe during midnight in Spring of 2025. Executions were carried out at the gallows hill until the mid-18th century.
Jakob Kullberg: cello / Jacob Kirkegaard: field recordings and cello.
Live performances on Friday and Saturday Sep 5 & 6, 2025





THE GREY ZONE (NeverWhere)

New work for Moss Biennial - Between / Worlds: Resonant Ecologies, Norway, 2025: The Grey Zone (NeverWhere) is created from sound recordings of a radioactive space combined with the natural sounds of the forest in the MOMENTUM 13 outdoor exhibition area. Sound captured inside the Zone of Alienation in Chernobyl, Ukraine is the sound of a radioactive swimming pool. The sound of water dripping from the ceiling is played via speakers placed in trees by the natural pathway.

VOICES

Interview portrait of 'waste reclaimer' Amos from Kenya:
This is another film that I created for the The Circulate Initiative, New York, which is part of the ongoing project VOICES, - my on going collaboration with The Circulate Initiative.
Some of my films from this series were also produced in close collaboration with UN-HABITAT, Nairobi, Kenya.
Watch more of the videos at CPH:PIX

Jacob Kirkegaard receives New Carlsberg Foundation's Artist Award, 2025

I am honoured to have received New Carlsberg Foundation's prestigious Artist award. Here's a film that JJ Film created about me for this special occasion.

NAUFRAGIUM

Naufragium is a new sound installation that I have created on commissioned by and for Museum of Copenhagen. The work is now permanently installed in one of the museum's galleries. It was supported by Ny Carlsbergfondet, Det Obelske Familiefond and Augustinus Fonden. Announcement in Danish. Photo by Regitze Westergaard, Venice, Italy, Autumn 2024

SNOWBLIND

Thrilled to announce my new vinyl album Snowblind released by The Helen Scarsdale Agency (USA). Jim Haynes writes:
"With Snowblind, Kirkegaard turns to history, and a poetic, failed attempt for a team of Swedish explorers to reach the North Pole by balloon in the late 19th Century. Perhaps driven by blind adventurism, perhaps consumed by his own delusions, S.A. Andrée launched this ill-fated flight in July 1897, registering only two days in the air before crashing into the ice and ultimately failing to navigate the frigid waters and ice floes. Yet documentation of their expedition - photographic, scientific, and diaristic - survived, to be discovered some thirty years after their deaths.
“I wanted to created a cold and hostile album, where there is no escape, no warmth and no happy ending,” as Kirkegaard explains about Snowblind. “Yet, I wanted to leave out any immediate drama. It is the creeping shock, the icy feeling from realizing what has been lost and that there’s no escape.” Yes, Snowblind is a very bleak album, but one that eschews the isolationist, long-form drone of conceptually similar works by Thomas Köner, Lustmord, Werkbund, and Lull with interconnected constellations of cryptic tone, thrumming reverberation, arctic bluster, and a plethora of harrowing sonic proclamations."

Listen to the album or buy it via The Helen Scardale Agency:

LEAVING NO ONE BEHIND
PARA:DOX

This is a video compilation that focuses on the voices and real-life stories of waste reclaimers highlighting their journeys, challenges and aspirations.
All films were made by me and produced by UN-Habitat, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and The Circulate Initiative. South Africa, Nigeria, Vietnam and India, 2023.

The videos were premiered by UN-Habitat in Kenya in November 2023 for an event focused on the voices of waste reclaimers. It was co-hosted by The Circulate Initiative and UN-Habitat in Nairobi during the third session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC-3) to develop an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution, including in the marine environment.

Hypogeum

This new and immersive work invites the listener on a journey in sound through the colossal Copenhagen sewer system. I composed it of sound recordings that I made of its sewer pipes, storm water tunnels, pump stations, and majestic cistern-like water reservoirs.

Hypogeum reveals a vast and complex underground infrastructure, that is vital to the life and health of the city.
Spring 2024. Commissioned by New Carlsberg Foundation.

Tale of the Bee

This work draws inspiration from the now extinct and nearly forgotten European tradition; Telling the Bees, which involved informing bees about important events in a person's life or in the world by whispering or singing messages into beehives. According to the myth, as bees had access to the underworld and could act as messengers.

The artwork Tale of the Bee flips the tradition and questions whether bees have something to tell us. I therefore made a 24-hour sound recording inside a beehive. The sounds of the bees are then printed on vinyl. I ultimately transcribed the sound waves back into panels of beeswax produced by the bees from the same hive.
Munkeruphus, Spring 2024.
Supported by the Danish Arts Foundation.