Call for Art

Call for Art is the longest running project of the Van Abbemuseum Choir.

Every day that the Van Abbemuseum opens its doors, at 11 am the artwork Call for Art, a call to come and visit the museum, sounds from the tower above the original entrance of the museum.

Inspired by churches ringing their bells, or imams calling from minarets to join in prayer, Doreen Westphal proposed a similar call, an 'art call'. It was purchased by the Doen Foundation. And in 2014, the Van Abbemuseum decided to realize the project for the collection presentation Once upon a time.

As a starting point, Doreen took Martin Creeds' well-known sound in the elevator in the new building of the museum, who since 2003 has been singing  going up from low to high and downwards from high to low. For Call she wanted a sound that doesn't go up and down, but slowly becomes wider and narrower and extends not 'vertically' but 'horizontally'.

She asked Willy de Rooij to set her Call for Art to music. It became a piece for mixed choir and soloist. We sang it for the first time during the opening of the exhibition Confessions of the Imperfect on November 22, 2014. Amplified by four loudspeakers in the tower, each in the direction of one of the four cardinal points, Call sounded over the city: Come, people, come!, in the three languages ​​most spoken in Eindhoven in 2014: Dutch, English and Turkish. Click here to listen.

Especially for the U R ART Festival, on September 21, 2019, the Call was translated into the other four languages ​​of the museum's European SmARTplaces partners. During that festival the choir performed the work also in French, German, Spanish and Finnish.