Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s largest ‘clinamen’ at Park Avenue Armory
Park Avenue Armory presents the largest iteration to date of clinamen,a site-responsive aquatic and musical installation by French multimedia artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot. Situated within the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, clinamen features five circular basins of water filled with hundreds of ceramic bowls that float and gently collide to produce microtonal chiming sounds. The installation immerses audiences within an ever-changing visual and sonic environment that encourages extended looking and listening. Marking the first presentation of the installation in New York since one of its earliest iterations more than two decades ago, clinamen takes over the Drill Hall from June 10 through August 2, 2026.
“With clinamen, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot transforms the Drill Hall into a living, listening environment. Though it seems simple in concept, the installation produces ever-changing musical configurations, creating a bespoke experience for each visitor,” said Rebecca Robertson, Adam R. Flatto Founding President and Executive Producer of Park Avenue Armory. “Céleste is a quintessential Armory artist—a genre-straddling multihyphenate who reimagines how audiences experience a space—and he adds a new chapter to our history of transforming the Drill Hall with water-filled work, following Satoshi Miyagi’s Antigone and tears become…streams become... by Douglas Gordon and Hélène Grimaud.”
Equal parts visual artist, musician, and composer, Boursier-Mougenot mixes various media to explore the boundary between art and the everyday. His works often operate as unconventional musical scores “performed” spontaneously by mundane objects—such as balloons, vacuum cleaners, and bowls—or even animals, including birds and bees.
In 1997, he developed the first iteration of the series that would eventually be called clinamen, a term that refers to the random motion of atoms. The title aptly captures the dynamic nature of the installation, in which ordinary porcelain bowls, hand-selected for their timbre and drift, are pushed along by a gentle, invisible current, serendipitously colliding to create a constantly changing sonic environment.
“clinamen exemplifies the kind of work that Park Avenue Armory exists to champion: ambitious, immersive, and deeply responsive to its setting,” Deborah Warner, the Armory’s Anita K. Hersh Artistic Director, said. “At the Armory, the installation makes full use of the sonic and spatial possibilities of the Drill Hall, inviting audiences into a meditative environment shaped by the poetry of chance.”
At the Armory, as with each iteration of clinamen, Boursier-Mougenot will “tune” the installation to respond to the architecture and acoustics of the space, adapting the configuration of the basins, the selection of the bowls, and the water temperature and currents. In the Drill Hall, the work will be installed on an elevated platform, where visitors can stand or walk around the five basins, the largest of which is 40 feet in diameter and filled with 9,000 gallons of water. In these five basins, which form an inverted archipelago, are distributed nearly a thousand white porcelain bowls. A running bench around the perimeter invites visitors to sit, linger, and contemplate as clinamen shifts the atmosphere and acoustics of the cavernous space.
Prior to the Armory installation, clinamen was most recently presented at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris (2025) and before that at the Asia Culture Center in Gwangju (2024), SFMOMA in San Francisco (2018), the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne (2013), and other venues around the world. An early iteration of the work, created with inflatable plastic pools, was shown in New York at Paula Cooper Gallery in 1999 and 2000.
“clinamen is an installation that is intricately connected to its surroundings, so each iteration gives me a new opportunity to manipulate the work and its experience,” Céleste Boursier-Mougenot said. “The Armory offers not only a new kind of acoustic environment but also the ability to expand the work to its grandest scale yet. The Drill Hall is so immense that it allows visitors to really step into the heart of the sound, themselves becoming part of the installation and others’ experience of it. This work is an invitation to stay together with other people to share a moment of grace and beauty, or to delve into a more deep and intimate reverie.”
CLINAMEN
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot
June 10 – August 2
INSTALLATION HOURS
Tuesday – Thursday: 12:00pm–8:00pm
Friday: 12:00pm–10:00pm
Saturday – Sunday: 12:00pm–7:00pm
Closed Mondays, June 19, and July 4
TICKETS: $25 (plus fees)
Free for Park Avenue Armory members
ARTIST TALK: CÉLESTE BOURSIER-MOUGENOT
This insightful dialogue gives audiences the opportunity to hear directly from one of the Armory’s roster of artists and creative visionaries and explore the inspirations, ideas, and themes behind their work.
Thursday, June 11 at 6:00pm
Tickets: $40 (plus fees) – includes installation admission
ABOUT CÉLESTE BOURSIER-MOUGENOT
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot (b. 1961, Nice, France) lives and works in Sète. His works, which have been presented in contemporary art venues in France and abroad over the last 30 years, may be considered above all as those of a musician.
After being the composer for author and theater director Pascal Rambert’s company, Side One / Posthume Théâtre, in Paris from 1985 to 1994, Boursier-Mougenot began to give an autonomous form to his music by creating art installations. He designs dispositifs, or environments that extend the notion of musical score to heterodox configurations of materials and media, using the most diverse situations or objects to manifest their sonic potential and generate spontaneous, live aural forms. Deployed in relation to the architectural or contextual frame of the exhibition spaces, each dispositif provides an invitation to a listening experience in which sound-generating processes are delivered to the gaze and understanding of the visitor.
Among Boursier-Mougenot’s most representative series of works are: clinamen, circular basins filled with water in which ordinary porcelain bowls chosen for their timbre drift, gently collide, and produce chiming sounds; from here to ear, aviaries designed as “bird territories,” in which visitors interact by their simple presence and movements with Australian finches who fly, perch or hop on amplified electric guitars, thus concretely generating an abstract rock composition; of froad, an uninterrupted ballet of three grand pianos rendered mobile by the artist, and whose pursuit of, flight from, and occasional collision with, one another create a spontaneous piano score.
By providing various types of access and spaces for the visitor, whose momentary presence is an integral part of the work, these installations constitute variations on the principle of the “penetrable” artwork.
Additionally, in the last few years, Boursier-Mougenot has been producing soundless works, transposing his compositional processes to forms of motion or to simple arrangements of materials such as wood, water, or stones. Thus began a series of mineral installations, entitled choreography or miner(e)ality intended to be physically occupied and traversed or climbed upon by the visitors, whose bodily presence and movements constitute the living component of the works.
ABOUT PARK AVENUE ARMORY
Part palace, part industrial shed, Park Avenue Armory supports unconventional works in the performing and visual arts that cannot be fully realized in a traditional proscenium theater, concert hall, or white wall gallery. With its soaring 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall—reminiscent of 19th-century European train stations—and an array of exuberant period rooms, the Armory provides a platform for artists to push the boundaries of their practice, collaborate across disciplines, and create new work in dialogue with the historic building. Across its grand and intimate spaces, the Armory enables a diverse range of artists to create, students to explore, and audiences to experience epic, adventurous, relevant work that cannot be done elsewhere in New York.
The Armory both commissions and presents performances and installations in the grand Drill Hall and offers more intimate programming through its acclaimed Recital Series, which showcases musical talent from across the globe within the salon setting of the Board of Officers Room; its Artists Studio series curated by Jason Moran in the restored Veterans Room; Making Space at the Armory, a public programming series that brings together a discipline-spanning group of artists and cultural thought-leaders around the important issues of our time; and the Malkin Lecture Series that features presentations by scholars and writers on topics related to Park Avenue Armory and its history. In addition, the Armory also has a year-round Artists-in-Residence program, providing space and support for artists to create new work and expand their practices.
The Armory’s creativity-based arts education programs provide access to the arts to thousands of students from underserved New York City public schools, engaging them with the institution’s artistic programming and outside-the-box creative processes. Through its education initiatives, the Armory provides access to all Drill Hall performances, workshops taught by Master Teaching Artists, and in-depth residencies that support the schools’ curriculum. Youth Corps, the Armory’s year-round paid internship program, begins in high school and continues into the critical post-high school years, providing interns with mentored employment, job training, and skill development, as well as a network of peers and mentors to support their individual college and career goals.
The Armory is undergoing a multi-phase renovation and restoration of its historic building led by architects Herzog & de Meuron, with Platt Byard Dovell White as Executive Architects.
