Karen Werner
Night Air, 2025

Local frequencies: 100.3 FM, 93.8 FM, 88.6 FM, 1314 AM  
Globally via shortwave: 6160 kHz and 3975 kHz  

Tune in to Night Air by Karen Werner, a nightly radio work broadcasting live as part of Bergen Assembly. At 22:00 for each of the assembly’s 60 evenings, Bergen Kunsthall becomes a transmission space. Into the quiet of the empty galleries, guests will sing lullabies of their choosing, opening a tender space of collective listening across the city and beyond. By day, the accumulative traces of each performance can be found in a book that contains the lullaby titles.

Now an abandoned communication infrastructure (FM and AM radio were discontinued in Norway in 2017), analogue radio has the texture of distance mixed into its signals. Its fragile waves are affected by everything from walls to weather, even interacting with the Earth’s ionosphere in the darkness. Rather than collapsing or erasing distance, Werner wants it to become audible as a way of illuminating the spaces for connection.

The sense of a lullaby is carried in our bodies as much as by our voices, and can bring collective comfort when shared — like a vast wool blanket. They can be passed through generations as a connecting point across space and time. This intimate work doubles as a practice of care that amplifies vulnerability, inviting us to listen across walls, with strangers, and over the threshold of sleep.

Night Air continues the artist’s long-standing engagement with radio as a poetic and political medium navigating form and nothingness, nearness and distance. The work offers a point of connection between the public facing institution and the more private realm of the personal. As a participatory project, radios can be borrowed from the Bergen Kunsthall reception, the Bergen Assembly office, and the Terminus Hotel, making it possible to tune in from your bedroom, studio, or wherever you are and the signal reaches. Dates are also available for members of the public to sing a lullaby.

Thank you:
Siavash Kheirkhah for the inspiration of Melodies of the Motherland; Sepideh Garakani for singer outreach assistance; Beate Poikāne for scenographic support; Bergen Kringkaster and Øystein Ask for radio frequency access; Said Wayra for sound engineering; Giulia Heuser for book-making and BAS students Iver Kubberød, Vilde Amundsen, and Gilbert Holbak for carpentry and modeling.