Thirty Cylinders and One Line of Light: Jónsi’s VOX at Kunstsilo

ARCHITECTURE · KRISTIANSAND

Reading time: 10 min

A grain silo is built to keep light, weather and air out, and to hold a mass of loose material perfectly still. That is also, almost exactly, the specification for a room in which to show a work made of light, sound and scent. Kunstsilo in Kristiansand spent seventy-one years doing the first job and now does the second, and Jónsi’s VOX made the case better than any wall text could.

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Kunstsilo opened on 11 May 2024 on Odderøya, the rock peninsula at the mouth of Kristiansand harbour, inside a functionalist grain silo that had stood empty since 2006. In December 2025 it was given the Prix Versailles World Title for the world’s most beautiful museum, announced at UNESCO in Paris, and in 2026 it took a RIBA International Award for Excellence. For a building whose original brief was to store fifteen thousand tonnes of barley, that is a considerable second act.

Between 1 May and 12 October 2025 the museum showed VOX, by the Icelandic artist Jónsi, in its European premiere outside Iceland. It is a twenty-five minute work made from a single human voice, distributed across eight channels of sound, four LED screens and a scent released into the room. It has since moved on, and the building it was shown in has not, which is a useful way round to think about both.

Because the interesting thing about VOX at Kunstsilo is not that a museum in a silo hosted an immersive artwork. It is that the specification of a grain silo and the specification of a black-box gallery turn out to be the same document.

A building designed to keep the world out

The silo was designed by Arne Korsmo and Sverre Aasland, two of the central figures in Norwegian functionalism. Korsmo is better known for Villa Stenersen in Oslo, and the silo carries the same conviction in a rougher register: a long white slab on the waterfront, unornamented, its form dictated entirely by what was happening inside it.

What was happening inside was thirty concrete cylinders, the first bank completed in 1935 and a second added later in the decade, rising to a little over thirty-seven metres and holding up to fifteen thousand tonnes of grain. The cylinders were the structure and the storage at once. There was no frame carrying a skin; the tubes did both jobs, which is why the building reads as a solid rather than as a container with walls.

Consider what a grain silo has to do. It must exclude daylight, because light degrades stored grain. It must exclude weather and control humidity, because damp grain spoils. It must be sealed against birds, insects and vermin. It must be structurally stiff enough to hold an enormous, shifting, dead-weight mass without deflecting. And its interior finish is irrelevant to anybody, because nobody is meant to be inside it.

Now consider what a room showing a work of light and sound has to do. Exclude daylight. Control humidity, for the works and the equipment. Seal tightly. Stand still under load. And offer surfaces that do nothing at all, because everything the visitor is meant to notice will be projected, emitted or released into the volume rather than hung on the wall.

Korsmo and Aasland were not designing a gallery. They were solving an agricultural storage problem with the most rigorous means available in 1935. The overlap is a coincidence, but it is a very productive one, and it is the reason silos across Europe keep being converted into art buildings while other industrial types resist it.

What the architects cut, and what they left hanging

The conversion was won in an international competition in December 2016 by three Barcelona practices working together: Mestres Wåge Arquitectes, Mendoza Partida and BAX studio. The instinct with a structure like this is to keep the shell and gut the middle. What they did is more precise than that.

They cut the cylinders open through the lower levels to form a single central hall, roughly twenty-one metres high, top-lit and narrow, which is why almost everyone who writes about it reaches for the word basilica. The curved concrete of the cut tubes is left exposed, formwork marks and seventy years of wear intact, so the hall reads as a space carved out of a solid rather than one built up from parts.

Then comes the detail that makes the project. The upper twelve metres of the silo tubes were kept, and left hanging in mid-air above the hall, with the structure beneath them removed. You stand at the bottom of a room and look up into the underside of a bank of concrete cylinders that no longer reach the ground. It is a structural statement and an act of preservation in one move, and it tells you exactly what the building used to be without a single interpretive panel.

The galleries themselves sit around that hall rather than in it: twenty-five rooms across three floors, about 3,300 square metres, mostly in two adjoining volumes, one of which had deteriorated so badly it was rebuilt to match. These are plain white boxes with squared plans and simple recessed ceilings, and they were designed to be plain. The concrete drama is concentrated in the circulation, and the rooms where the art hangs are deliberately quiet.

The collection they were built for is the Tangen Collection, more than five thousand five hundred works by over three hundred Nordic artists from the 1910s to the 1990s, assembled by Nicolai Tangen and given to the city. It is the largest private collection of Nordic modernist art in existence, and it is why a museum of this scale exists in a city of ninety thousand people at all.

The work: a voice drawn as a horizontal line

VOX was not shown in the silo hall. It was shown in one of those plain rooms, blacked out, and the restraint of the setting is the whole reason it worked.

The room is a rectangle. Four LED screens run around it, one on each wall, and each is a horizontal band roughly the depth of a shelf, set at about the eye level of a seated adult. There is one object in the room: a low black bench, wide enough for several people, placed dead centre. You sit on it, and the light is level with you.

On the bands, the voice appears as light. Not as a waveform crawling along a display, but as discrete lobes of white brightness that swell, travel and dissolve along the strip, each one soft-edged and bleeding into the next. Stand back far enough to take in a whole wall and you can count roughly eight of them along a single band, which is the same number as the sound channels feeding the room. Light and sound are not illustrating each other. They are the same signal, given two outputs.

The room is hazed, lightly and constantly, so each band throws a shallow wedge of visible light out into the air above the floor. That is what turns four flat screens into a volume. Without the haze you would be looking at illuminated strips on walls. With it, you are sitting inside four soft planes of light that meet somewhere over your head.

Everything else is subtracted. Mid-grey walls that give almost nothing back. A dark floor. No plinth, no wall text in the room, no colour at all: white light, grey wall, black bench. A seated figure in front of a lit band becomes a silhouette with no features, which is a fair description of what the work is doing to the voice as well.

Every sound in the piece begins as Jónsi’s own voice, then goes through computer processing and, in places, through models that generate new vocal material from it. The result is a voice you cannot identify as a voice, from a singer whose voice is among the most identifiable in modern music.

The perfumer in the band

Then there is the smell, and this is where the piece stops being a light show.

The scent released into the room is built from vetiver root, galbanum, angelica root, iris root and cis-3-hexenol. Four of those are roots or root resins: deep, earthy, slightly bitter, the smell of soil and cut stems rather than of flowers. The fifth is the interesting one. Cis-3-hexenol is the compound commonly called leaf alcohol, and it is the single molecule most responsible for the smell of freshly cut grass.

Four roots and the smell of cut grass, released into a building that spent seventy-one years holding grain. Nobody planned that rhyme, and it is the best thing about the work in that particular room.

The scent is also not a supplier’s contribution. Jónsi is a self-taught perfumer. In 2017 he co-founded Fischersund, a family perfume house in downtown Reykjavík, with his three sisters Lilja, Ingibjörg and Sigurrós and their partners Sindri and Kjartan, named after the street it stands on. He works from a perfume organ, and scent has run through his installations for years, alongside the sound.

That matters for how the work should be read. An artist who composes with materials as well as with frequencies is not adding an atmospheric flourish at the end of the process. He is using a second medium he is genuinely trained in, and the choice of five specific materials is as considered as the choice of eight channels.

Jónsi began exhibiting seriously in the last decade and is represented by Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, where VOX was first shown in Los Angeles in 2023. Solo presentations have gone to the Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Nordic Museum in Seattle and Reykjavík Art Museum, and he has worked with Doug Aitken, Olafur Eliasson and Merce Cunningham. The music is the part everybody knows. The practice is broader than that and has been for some time.

Kunstsilo’s curator Karl Olav Segrov Mortensen described the exhibition as a complete expansion of the senses, a space where technology, intuition and nature are interwoven. The museum’s director Maria Mediaas Jørstad placed it in a longer Nordic engagement with nature, mythology and existential questions. Both readings hold. The material reading holds too, and it is simpler: a singer who makes perfume built a room out of his own voice and the smell of roots.

Why the ordinary room was the right room

It would have been easy, and probably tempting, to put VOX in the silo hall. Twenty-one metres of raw concrete with a bank of cut cylinders hanging overhead is the most photogenic space in the building, and an artwork about voice and resonance placed under it would have made an image that travelled.

It would also have been the wrong room, and for reasons that are entirely technical.

Bare concrete at that height is acoustically live. A hard, tall, narrow volume returns long reverberation, and an eight-channel composition depends on the listener being able to tell the channels apart. Reverberation blurs exactly that. The hall is also top-lit, and daylight of any level makes an LED band read as a grey rectangle with a bright smear on it rather than as light. And scent needs a bounded volume with slow air movement; a twenty-one metre chimney with a public route through it disperses it in minutes.

The plain gallery gives all four things back. A squared room with plasterboard and a low ceiling has a short reverberation time, so eight channels stay eight channels. No daylight, so a screen at low brightness still reads as pure light. A small sealed volume, so haze and scent hold. And proportions close enough to domestic that a horizontal band at seated eye height feels like a horizon rather than a picture.

That is the design argument for a museum like this one, and it is worth stating plainly because the marketing of a converted industrial building almost never does. The dramatic space sells the tickets. The plain rooms wrapped around it do the work. The achievement at Kunstsilo is that both were designed with the same care, and that the architects were confident enough to make twenty-five rooms deliberately quiet in a building whose whole exterior identity is thirty concrete tubes.

A visitor walking from the silo hall into the VOX room passed from the loudest space in the building to the most controlled one in about fifteen steps. That transition is the museum working exactly as designed.

Jonsi Portrait by Paul Salveson

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

Adaptive reuse is usually argued on carbon, on heritage, or on the pleasure of the contrast between an old shell and a new interior. All three apply here. The stronger argument at Kunstsilo is a functional one, and it is rarely made.

A building built to hold something still, in the dark, at a controlled humidity, behind sealed walls, is already most of the way to being a building that can hold contemporary art. Korsmo and Aasland solved that problem in 1935 for barley. Mestres Wåge, Mendoza Partida and BAX cut into their solution in a way that made the original logic visible instead of hiding it, and then had the discipline to surround the spectacle with twenty-five ordinary rooms.

VOX has gone. The room it was shown in is still there, waiting for the next work that needs darkness, silence, a sealed volume and a horizon at seated eye height. That is the part worth travelling for.

8 – channel sound installation, speakers, LED screens, fog, scent (Vetiver root, galbanum, angelica root, iris root/ orris, cis-3-hexenol) | Dimensions variable | Duration: 25 minutes | Edition of 3, 1AP | Photo by Jeff McLane | Video by Walker Sayan (Tin Dragon Media) (TBG 25045)