2025 FREMANTLE BIENNALE COLLABORATION

“CAN YOU HEAR ME?” 

Saar Amptmeijer

can you hear me? is a sculptural installation and deep-sea opera by Saar Amptmeijer. The work explores the internet’s physical and power-laden infrastructure – one that runs on the bottom of the ocean floor as a huge network of submarine tubes and cables, following currents of an embodied and obfuscated history.

Saar translates this hidden world into a constellation of ceramic, metal, PVC and found-object sculptures, their forms imagining deep sea and digital infrastructure, fragments of a network usually unseen. From the installation drifts an operatic monodrama that weaves together undersea mysteries, snippets of messages and observations on power, connection and imagination itself.

In bringing these invisible systems into material and sonic form, can you hear me reflects on the complexity of imagination – and asks how fantasy can carry us beyond the internet as a site of control, and towards the sanctuary it was once envisioned to be.

We are very excited to welcome back Saar Amptmeijer, Saar was 2025's first site-specific residency here at CURRENT. 

BIO

Saar Amptmeijer is an artist working across sound, sculpture, installation and writing. Drawn equally to concepts and materials, their practice follows a kind of magpie logic, forever in awe of the shiny wonder world of material and conceptual exploration. Saar is interested in hidden structures and networks that shape our realities, currently researching the very physical realities of our digital lives.


Originally from the Netherlands, Saar graduated from the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht and has exhibited at institutions such as the Centraal Museum Utrecht and W139 in Amsterdam and many DIY and non-institutions both in the Netherlands and ‘Australia’. In 2012, they moved to Naarm/Melbourne, and later lived and worked in Mparntwe/Alice Springs, where they supported artists and their making at Bindi  and as Director of Watch This Space.


Saar has released experimental albums independently and in collaboration, and has worked with dancers, musicians, and other comrades across disciplines. They see art as a vehicle of change, connection and beauty as a way to imagine and experience the radical potential of our world. They are currently based on Whadjuk Noongar Boodja, working from their studio at Fremantle Arts Centre.