Lecture on Birdsong

Courtesy Hidde van Seggelen

Hamburg, Germany — Hidde van Seggelen is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Andy Holden, opening in conjunction with the inaugural edition of Hamburg Art Week. The exhibition features a dialogue between a newly completed body of sculptural work and the premiere of an extraordinary, long-form film developed in collaboration with the artist's father, the ornithologist Peter Holden.

Coinciding with this exhibition in Hamburg is the announcement of a new monograph titled Weight of Imagination (text by: Jennifer Higgie) documenting Andy Holden's prolific practice.

The Film: A Fifteen-Year Study of Landscape, Science, and Translation.

Developed over fifteen years and adapted from a series of live performances first presented at Tate Britain in 2011, Lecture on Birdsong (2011–2026) follows six walks undertaken within a one-mile radius of the Holdens’ home, from the end of winter through spring. Combining walking, literature, music, natural history and autobiography, the film explores the persistent human desire to understand and translate birdsong while acknowledging the limits of that endeavour.

Drawing on traditions of nature writing, the film unfolds as a dialogue between father and son while tracing and questioning the process of learning. Peter Holden, one of Britain’s most respected ornithologists and educators, teaches Andy to identify birds through sound rather than sight, revisiting knowledge that Andy never fully absorbed as a child. As they move through hedgerows, churchyards, riverbanks and farmland, discussions of territory, ecology, mimicry and evolution unfold alongside Romantic poetry, classical music and the history of ornithology. The work moves from subjective responses to birdsong towards increasingly sophisticated methods of scientific analysis, only to encounter the same impasse: birdsong can be studied, described and reproduced, but never fully translated.

The exhibition also presents a series of screenprints documenting each public iteration of Lecture on Birdsong. Produced over the course of the project, the prints function as records of performances that have gradually evolved into the film now presented in Hamburg. Together they chart the development of the work across fifteen years, from lecture-performance to cinematic form.