The Grand Piano — The Big Silent
The grand piano is one of Western music’s most loaded objects, an instrument so deeply embedded in cultural tradition that its ideological weight often goes unnoticed.
In this essay, The Grand Piano – The Big Silent, published in the catalogue for Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard’s installation The Big Silent, I examine how the artist dismantles the grand piano, literally and conceptually, as a way of questioning the epistemologies, hierarchies and colonial histories quietly embedded within it.
»The grand piano is not merely an instrument but an emblem of bourgeois tradition, artistic discipline, and aesthetic hierarchy.«
THE GRAND PIANO — THE BIG SILENT (2026).
Through a slow, collective act of disassembly, Løkkegaard transforms the instrument from a monument of Western tradition into an unstable, queered material whose meanings are never allowed to settle. Drawing on thinkers including Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Sara Ahmed and Ursula K. Le Guin, the essay explores what it means to approach a familiar object differently and what new configurations of body, material and meaning might become possible when we do.
Published by Forlaget Aftryk, March 2026. Supported by the Danish Arts Foundation.
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