SKULKESKOLEN presents Olan Monk and Dylan Kerr (C.A.N.V.A.S) + guests

5 Sep, 21:00
Landmark

Founded by Olan Monk and Lugh O'Neill, C.A.N.V.A.S. is an artist-run record label and performance platform that has, since 2018, brought together a dispersed community of musicians, performers and artists through live events, recordings and long-term collaborations. Conceived as a response to geographic distance and increasingly virtual forms of cultural exchange, it creates spaces for collective experimentation, sustaining practices that move between local traditions, experimental sound and contemporary performance. For SKULKESKOLEN, C.A.N.V.A.S. presents performances by Olan Monk and Dylan Kerr.

Dylan Kerr presents Substratum, a 40-minute composition for voice and fixed electronics drawing inspiration from the Hindustani Dhrupad tradition. The work explores how the voice, in dialogue with sine and sawtooth waves tuned in just intonation, generates psychoacoustic effects. As the electronics gradually increase in density, the voice dissolves into a field of interference patterns and combination-tone harmonies, forming a dense, pulsating mass that recalls, in the artist's words, the sensation of being slowly subsumed in the vibrations beneath the surface of the earth.

Olan Monk will perform music from Songs for Nothing, their latest album released on AD 93 in November 2025. This fragmentary record was written upon their return to live in Conamara, on the west coast of Ireland, and veers between collaged pop, machinic rock and slow airs, imbued with the influence of sean-nós singing; Irish language songs in the 'old style' that often proclaim tales of love, loss and landscape. Songs for Nothing suggests a one-way transaction, an offering to the listener expecting nothing in return, but also a devotion to nothingness; and the realm of infinite possibility that springs from its well. The granite pulsates, the ocean and sky reflect intensities, seaweed rots on shingle shores, plants bloom, ancient trees come up for air from the drowned forest in the bay, the sun splinters through the low clouds. Heavy guitar drones, voice and tin whistle entangle with recordings of drums, strings, woodwind and harp, entwining a love of song traditions with a long-standing alienation from the language and culture of the land.

Olan Monk is a musician, performer and writer from Cois Fharraige in Conamara, Ireland. Their practice involves experimental and popular songwriting, performing as a solo act and in collaboration with other musicians, including recordings and performances with Actress, Ashley Paul, Elvin Brandhi, James K, Maria Somerville, Michael Speers, Moin, Princ€ss and Shampain. They co-founded C.A.N.V.A.S. with Lugh O’Neill as an events series and record label, established in 2018 to give collective agency to an increasingly dispersed community of artists. Past releases include Love/Dead (2020) and Auto Life (2021) on C.A.N.V.A.S. and Dubplate 08 (2022) on AD 93. They contributed the single ‘Surf’ to Scenic Route’s The Road Less Travelled Vol. 2 compilation (2024) and feature on the single ‘Guess It’s Wrecked’ from Moin’s third album You Never End (2024), released on AD 93. In 2025, they released Songs for Nothing, their second LP and AD 93 label debut. The album is a collection of songs and instrumentals that veers between collaged pop, machinic rock and slow airs; featuring contributions from Maria Somerville, Risteárd Ó’hAodha (of Princ€ss), Peadar Tom Mercier (of Trá Pháidín), Aindriú de Buitléir, Róisín Berkeley, Michael Speers and Dylan Kerr. Past performances include appearances at Rewire, The Hague; Aiséirí in Leisureland, Galway; National Concert Hall, Dublin; the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Belfast; cafe OTO, London; Barbican Hall, London; Institute for Contemporary Art, London; PAF Olomouc; EOS crossings, Frankfurt and throughout Ireland, England and continental Europe. They are currently touring as a solo performer and with collaborating performers in ever-evolving arrangements of songs from their catalogue.

Dylan Kerr is an artist and vocalist working across performance, sound, photography, installation, moving image and composition. Their practice is deeply attuned to place and often begins with the histories and unique resonant qualities of the sites they engage with. In their compositions, they combine process-based methods, microtonality, and extended vocal techniques to explore psychoacoustic phenomena such as beating, interference patterns, and the interplay between the voice and space. Recent works include Caoineadh an Chóibh, a 24-hour durational work at the Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, Ireland (2025), reflecting on Cobh's history as a departure point for those displaced by colonisation, and Solo for Breath (2025), exploring the timbral and spectral qualities of breath through extended techniques.

As part of Another Sun –a curatorial programme on the poetics and politics of the subsurface– Bergen Kunsthall presents SKULKESKOLEN, a collective study bringing together artists and researchers from 2–6 September 2026. Through workshops, field trips, screenings, performances, role-playing games and other participatory forms, the programme explores how inherited relations to land, geology and extraction might be reorganised.

Participants include Abdalla Eltayeb, Anne Marie Deacy, Ase Brunborg Lie, Bassam Issa Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehigan, Dylan Kerr, Eimear Walshe, Hanni Kamaly, Ina Hagen, Karina Sletten, Katarina Dorothea Isaksen, Kathryn Yusoff, Dr. Memory Biwa, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Olan Monk, Tom K. Kemp and others to be announced.

SKULKESKOLEN is co-curated by Bergen Kunsthall Live Curator Jade Meili Barget and curator and professor Nora O’ Murchú, developed with the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems at the University of Limerick.

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