Resounding Io (from the series Acoustical Visions)

Born in Cleveland in 1947 and based in San Francisco, Bill Fontana began his career as a composer and, over more than forty years, his oeuvre has unearthed the delicacies of the hidden music surrounding us in our daily lives, drawing our attention to it in striking ways. Fontana’s installations, which highlight the idea that the act of listening is a way of making music, use sound as a “sculptural” medium to interact with and transform our perceptions of visual and architectural settings. Featuring a multi-screen and multi-channel installation commissioned by Arter, Bill Fontana’s Resounding Io constitutes the artist’s first solo exhibition in Turkey and a unique addition to his series "Acoustical Visions" which explores the image that a sound “makes” and the sound that an image “creates”.



"Resounding Io" is based on research surveys conducted by Fontana in Istanbul, whereby the artist made video and sound recordings, some underwater, at numerous locations along the Bosphorus, as well as in two Byzantine cisterns, namely the Theodosius Cistern and the Basilica Cistern. The relocating of the sound data Fontana collected in Istanbul with a portable recording studio – consisting of an 8-channel digital recorder, acoustic microphones, hydrophones and accelerometers – was achieved by way of playing them via loudspeakers in the Basilica Cistern at night, which generated an incredible response from the huge void/vaults of the structure, a variety of reverberation, which in turn were recorded as the final composition through a method called “re/sounding”. The work is titled in reference to the mythological story of Io, who gave her name to the Bosphorus. Io, in Greek mythology, was regarded as the first priestess of Hera, the wife of Zeus. Zeus fell in love with Io and, to protect her from the wrath of Hera, changed her into a white heifer. Hera then sent a gadfly to torment Io, who therefore wandered all over the earth, crossed the Ionian Sea trying to flee from the gadfly, and swam the strait that was thereafter known as the Bosphorus (literally meaning Ox-Ford).

“Resounding Io”, exhibition view, 2022.