Jacob Kirkegaard (born in Denmark 1975) is an artist and composer who works in carefully selected environments to generate recordings that are used in compositions, or combined with video imagery in visual, spatial installations. His works reveal unheard sonic phenomena and present listening as a means of experiencing the world. Kirkegaard has recorded sonic environments as different as subterranean geyser vibrations, empty rooms in Chernobyl, Arctic calving glaciers and tones generated by the human inner ear itself.
Kirkegaard has presented his works at galleries, museums, biennales and concert spaces throughout the world, including MoMA in New York, LOUISIANA - Museum of Modern Art and ARoS in Denmark, The Menil Collection & at the Rothko Chapel in Houston, The Sydney Biennale in Australia, Aichi Triennale in Nagoya, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan.
Jacob Kirkegaard has gallery representation through Galleri Tom Christoffersen (DK) and Fridman Gallery (USA). His work is represented in the permanent collection of LOUISIANA - Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.
Kirkegaard's sound works are released on labels such as Touch (UK), Important Records (USA), mAtter (JAP), VON Archives (FR), Holotype Editions (GR) & Posh Isolation (DK). He is a founding member of the sound art collective freq_out. In 2016 Jacob Kirkegaard was the sound-artist-in-residency at St. John's College, University of Oxford, U.K.
"One of contemporary sound art's most subtle, intriguing figures. More artistically minded than field recordings, more naturally hewn than noise tapes, Kirkegaard amplifies hidden worlds into evocative drifts." Rolling Stone, December 2015
Kirkegaard has countered Duchamp’s dictum, “One can look at seeing, one can’t hear hearing.” Douglas Kahn, Earside Out, 2014
"For all the scientific rigour to Kirkegaard's research into the sonic possibilities of various materials, his work reveals an underlying fascination for the mysteries and myths embedded in them. His work channels an access to an inner world." Anne Hilde Neset, The Wire, 07/09