Exhalation (2025)
by Madeleine Flynn, Tim Humphrey, and Vuth Lyno with Pal Panha
Site-specific installation
10-channel sound, papers
Whalers Tunnel, Fremantle
Fremantle Biennale 2025
Exhalation turns the Whalers Tunnel into a living organism – one that breathes, listens and shifts with the wind. Created by Madeleine Flynn, Tim Humphrey (Australia) and Vuth Lyno with Pal Panha (Cambodia), this immersive sound and sculpture installation is a quiet act of listening, care and renewal.
The work draws on a ritual practiced in Cambodia and across Southeast Asia, where Buddhist monks wrap orange cloth around trees in gestures of protection and care. Here, thousands of golden paper forms — echoing the form of the Kodjeningara flower from WA’s South West — flutter across the tunnel like flickers of light on the wind.
Sound enters on the breeze. Kinetic speakers respond to shifting wind currents, turning the tunnel into a space where sound is alive. The wind plays the tunnel like an instrument, and the installation shifts moment by moment, hour to hour.
This is a site heavy with histories: carved stone, prison walls, whaling ports. Exhalation doesn’t deny that weight — it leans into it, offering a counter gesture of tenderness and attention. It invites you to walk through, pause, sit, stay. To feel the tunnel differently.
Flynn and Humphrey create award-winning sonic environments that reshape how we listen. Vuth and Pal bring a deeply embedded, community-centred Cambodian practice shaped by memory, ritual, and social transformation. Together, they lean into the wind — as a practical and spiritual enabling of change.
Visual art and public program coordinator: Pal Panha
Visual art assistants: Leang Titnita, Phan Sophorn
Musicians: Winter McQuinn, Helen Svoboda
Recording engineer: Pat Telfer, Sydney Rd Studio
Moving speaker design: Robert Larsen
Sound system design: Tom McKeand