porcelain bowls drift between The Armory
Inside New York’s Park Avenue Armory, fans line up as water gathers in three circular fields, where white porcelain bowls drift across the surface and knock into each other in small collisions.
With family people, French artist, musician and composer Céleste Boursier-Mougenot brings an aquatic sound installation back in New York on the largest scale to date, transforming the hall’s 55,000 square foot volume into a place for extended listening.
Installed from June 10 to August 2, 2026, the project fills the Drill Hall with three basins, each forty feet wide and holding more than 10,000 gallons of water. In front of them, nearly 800 porcelain bowls move through gentle currents, producing a vibrant composition that changes with each touch.
The premise is straightforward enough to understand at a glance, however the experience depends on slippage, lag and small differences between one ship and the next.
clinamen (v.11) 2026, exhibition view at Park Avenue Armory. © Céleste Boursier-Mougenot/ADAGP. image by Nicholas Knight
a sound work coordinated in the drill room
Artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot first developed the clinamen series in 1997, deriving its title from a term used to describe the random movement of atoms. Since then, it has traveled to institutions such as SFMOMA, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, the Asian Cultural Center in Gwangju and the Bourse de Commerce in Paris.
An early version appeared in New York at the Paula Cooper Gallery in 1999 and 2000, where inflatable plastic pools formed the basis of the work.
For the Armory, the artist has adapted the configuration to the scale and acoustics of the Drill Hall, choosing bowls for their individual timbre and calibrating the water temperature and currents that guide their movement.
The basins rise on a raised platform, allowing visitors to circle the water or pause along a continuous bench around the perimeter. From there, the work reads both visually and aurally, as a pattern of floating white figures and a scattered field of bells.
inside the Park Avenue Armory, porcelain bowls pass into pools of water and cross the drill hall
porcelain bowls become a live score in New York
Boursier-Mougenot’s practice often gives ordinary objects the role of performers. Balloons, vacuum cleaners, birds, bees, bowls and pianos have all appeared in his installations, each in conditions where sound emerges without a fixed score.
At cinamen, the bowls carry this idea with an understated physical presence. Their movement seems almost casual, but each contact sends a tone into the room, where water, ceramics, air and architecture shape the court.
The Armory’s cavernous interior gives these little sounds room to travel. Visitors enter a space where the scale of the hall and the delicacy of the work sit in tension, with water acting as both surface and instrument.
Installation takes time, as one bowl can drift for several minutes before touching its neighbor, and the next sound can reach from across the bowl or behind the body, making listening a spatial act.
Céleste Boursier Mougenot brings people back to New York in its biggest iteration yet
opportunity as design material
clinamen also extends the Armory’s history of large water-based works, following Satoshi Miyagi’s Antigone and Douglas Gordon and Hélène Grimaud’s tears become… streams become… However, Boursier-Mougenot approaches water through another register, using it to convey movement, chance and acoustic variation through a fixed beginning or a composition without end.
At a time when immersive art often relies on power, people hold attention through smaller events. Its drama comes from the relationship of scale and touch, the weight of hall and the lightness of porcelain, the way a small collision can fill a room.
In this sense, the work is as close to design as it is to music, building an environment out of material behavior and leaving the final arrangement open to visitors moving around it.
three circular basins each extend 40 feet across the Wade Thompson Drill Hall
nearly 800 white porcelain bowls float through gentle currents and collide to produce sound
