[5] During the 1980s, Oppenheim was a member of the experimental post punk rock band, Minimal Man, where she first began her early work in performance and film while living in San Francisco.
[9] The work consisted of a twenty-two second tape recording, of the artist repeating the words “shake me,” rendered in a soft, warbling voice.
[11] Both sound works were recordings of her repetitive, half-sung and half-spoken a cappella vocals that Italian Flash Art critic Emanuela De Cecco characterized as “a vital, unfiltered expression of the soul and the story.”[12] Oppenheim’s debut solo show, Sail On Sailor at 303 Gallery followed in 1994.
They conjure an extreme kind of solitude, that of a teen-ager in her bedroom, or perhaps even an inmate in an asylum, a solitude in which the sound of one's own voice is the only comfort.”[14] Sail On Sailor has since been exhibited in multiple venues, including The New Museum, New York (2013),[15][16] The International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Cartagena de Indias, Columbia (2014),[17] The D Museum, Seoul, Korea (2020),[18] and the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, France (2021).
The exhibition was held at the Fundação de Serralves in Porto, Portugal, where each of the ten artists were asked to create a work for inside the villa and outside in the surrounding gardens.
A critic for Artforum wrote, “The exquisite poetic sensitivity of Oppenheim’s work encourages us to wander through the house and the garden, to surrender to a place marked by that unmistakable saudade (yearning) that is the Portuguese form of melancholy.”[21] Sally Go Round has also been exhibited at Studio Guenzani, Milan (1995),[22] and at the Vienna Secession (2015).
[32][33] Also in 2022, she inaugurated her solo exhibition, She Had A Heavy Day, at greengrassi in London, featuring a rotating playlist of eight a cappella sound works that she recorded in the 1990s.
A record release party for Oppenheim’s vinyl LP, Voices fill my head, was held at greengrassi on the opening night of the exhibition.
[1] Both compilations included a number of songs that were originally introduced in her installation projects, including “Hey Joe,” “Tap Your Shoes,” “Sail on Sailor,” “Cry Me a River” and “She Had a Heavy Day.” A review in Artforum described Oppenheim’s singing on the eight tracks of Night Run as “hushed, hypnotic, and almost impossibly minimal, singing with herself, by herself", linking her long a capella rounds back to the musique concrète tape experiments of Halim El-Dabh and the electronic works of avant garde composer Robert Ashley.