At the Barbican’s Curve art gallery, I was transported to a seaside boardwalk in the evening twilight, surrounded by soft sand and tufts of grass. The scene opened up to guitars and percussion instruments planted in the ground alongside the pathway. A flock of zebra finches flew around and among a group of people and landed on the guitars. The guitars and instruments made sounds as the birds walked along the strings and pecked seeds from upturned cymbals. I thought for a moment that the artist might be Californian magically transporting Londoners to the beach, but no Céleste Boursier-Mougenot is French. This is his first solo exhibition in the UK.

You enter through a chain curtain and flashing strobe light, as if you are about to enter some select night club. I felt uncertain as I entered the dimness, not knowing what to expect. The walls have projections of large guitars and fingers flying among the frets, but you can’t hear what they were playing. Instead, you hear the noise of the dreaded “feedback” that musicians so often want to avoid. The overall effect is slightly eerie and unsettling. But then as you turn the corner (the Barbican art gallery isn’t called The Curve for nothing) there is a more playful, charming atmosphere once you spot the birds hopping and flying among the instruments, the sounds they make amplified and conveyed through speakers. The movement of people walking through the space prompts the birds to move and the flight of the birds prompts the people to move and duck. The exhibition is fun to see and the birds look used to humans invading their temporary habitat. Visitors looked more uncertain than the birds did.

The artist with the difficult-to-pronounce-name, Boursier-Mougenot, has a list of previous wacky exhibitions that includes Harmonichaos. This installation of vacuum cleaners had harmonicas attached to suction nozzles. As a visitor entered the gallery, a vacuum cleaner was turned on. I would have loved to see that!

Click on this link to find out more: Barbican art gallery