céleste boursier-mougenot's aquatic soundscape arrives in NYC

porcelain bowls drift among The Armory

Inside New York’s Park Avenue Armory, clinamen takes shape as water gathers into three circular basins, where white porcelain bowls drift across the surface and strike each other in small, ringing collisions. Following the project’s latest iteration at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris last year, French artist, musician, and composer Céleste Boursier-Mougenot brings the site-responsive, aquatic sound installation to New York at its largest scale to date, turning the hall’s 55,000-square-foot volume into a place for extended listening.

Installed from June 10th through August 2nd, 2026, the work fills the Drill Hall with three circular basins, each forty feet wide and holding more than 10,000 gallons of water. Across them, nearly 800 porcelain bowls move through gentle currents, producing a live composition that changes with each contact. The premise is plain enough to understand at a glance, yet the experience depends on drift, delay, and the small differences between one vessel and the next.

clinamen (v.11) 2026, exhibition view at Park Avenue Armory. © Céleste Boursier- Mougenot/ADAGP. image by Nicholas Knight

a sound work tuned to the drill hall

Artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot first developed the clinamen series in 1997, drawing its title from a term used to describe the random motion of atoms. Since then, it has traveled through institutions including SFMOMA, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, the Asia Culture Center in Gwangju, and the Bourse de Commerce in Paris. An early version appeared in New York at Paula Cooper Gallery in 1999 and 2000, where inflatable plastic pools formed the basis of the work.

For the Armory, the artist has adjusted the configuration to the Drill Hall’s scale and acoustics, selecting bowls for their individual timbre and calibrating the water temperature and currents that guide their movement. The basins rise on an elevated platform, allowing visitors to circle the water or pause along a continuous bench around the perimeter. From there, the work reads both visually and sonically, as a pattern of floating white forms and a dispersed field of chimes.

inside Park Avenue Armory, porcelain bowls drift across pools of water and ring through 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 one set into conditions where sound emerges without a fixed score. In clinamen, the bowls carry that idea with a restrained physical presence. Their movement looks almost casual, but each contact sends a tone into the hall, where water, ceramic, air, and architecture shape the pitch.

The Armory’s cavernous interior gives those small sounds room to travel. Visitors enter a space where the scale of the hall and the delicacy of the work sit in tension, with the water acting as both surface and instrument. The installation asks for time, as a bowl may drift for several minutes before touching its neighbor, and the next sound may arrive from across the basin, or from behind the body, making listening a spatial act.

Céleste Boursier Mougenot brings clinamen back to New York in its largest iteration to date

chance as a 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… Yet Boursier-Mougenot approaches water through another register, using it to carry motion, chance, and acoustic variation through a composition that has no fixed beginning or end.

At a moment when immersive art often leans on force, clinamen holds attention through smaller events. Its drama comes from the relation between scale and touch, the weight of the hall and the lightness of porcelain, the way a minor collision can fill a room. In that sense, the work feels close to design as much as music, building an environment from material behavior and leaving the final arrangement open to the visitors who move around it.

three circular basins each span 40 feet across the wade Thompson Drill Hall