Sound sits at the core of the Danish multidisciplinary artist and composer Ragnhild May's work, which draws upon sculpture, installation, and performance to inquire into the cultural and social history of musical instruments. 

May often meditates on instruments’ form, specifically regarding what she theorizes as having been designed for normative bodies to play, as well as their sonic limitations. To do so, she experiments with scale and multiplicity, sometimes inventing her own versions of these familiar objects, which can be both performed with and exhibited independently. In Monstrous Multiplayer Instrument (2024), a collaboration between May and the brass quartet Ensemble Apparat inspired by Karen Barad’s notion of “entanglement,” May combines brass instrument parts to create new hybrid instruments, which require multiple physically entangled performers to play. Institutional Critique for Kindergarten, her solo exhibition at TABAKALERA (ES), considers children’s experiences of musical learning via two gigantic handcrafted recorders and a sound installation. Sirene Song, May’s 2019 contribution to the group installation The Aesthetic Ear, explores mermaids—Denmark’s national icons—throughout history in the form of sound, composition, and sculpture.

Among the festivals where May has presented are Klang (DK), Spor (DK), Archipel (CH), and Gaudeamus (NL), as well as at experimental music spaces that include Issue Project Room (US), Roulette Intermedium (US), and Superdeluxe (JP). She has performed and exhibited at TABAKALERA (ES), The National Gallery of Denmark Museum of Contemporary Art (DK), Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art (DK), and Rønnebæksholm (DK). Her art is in the permanent collections of Horsens Kunstmuseum (DK) and Fuglsang Kunstmuseum (DK). 

May has received numerous Danish awards and grants from organizations that include the Carl Nielsen Talent Prize for young composers, the Danish Arts Foundation’s Young Artistic Elite program, and the Danish Composers’ Society. In 2016, her collaborative project with Stefan Maier, Music for Organs OAE & Electronics, was awarded “outstanding composition” by the Danish Arts Foundation. She holds degrees from Det The Royal Institute of Arts (SE), Akademie der Bildende Künste (AT), and Bard College (US), where she spent a year as a Fulbright grantee while completing her MFA in Sound Art. May is a recipient of long-term residencies from DAAD and the International Studio Art and Curatorial Program (NYC). She is currently a PhD fellow at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.