Next Time I'm Here I'll Be There

Main, Frankfurt 17.Mai 2002

was draußen wartet

Contributions to Homeland Sound Topography 01 – The Right Sides of the Road. from Volkmar Klien on Vimeo.

Untitled (Good times, bad Times)

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Homeless people are often locked out from the society. Especially in shoppingmalls and shoppingstreets they often get displaced and are segregated from the rest of the world. To demonstrate this unfairness I closed away the sleeping place of a homeless person with the logos of the consumers-society.

Untitled

La Ruleta de la Suerte is a Spanish quiz show in which candidates have to guess right adages by mention single characters. A slightly dressed woman has to turn around the right guessed characters for fake, actually all the characters are generated by a computer. We manipulated the video so the blackboard finally shows the sentence: Matad el Sexismo en la Television – Stop Sexism on Television

Everyones' Best Friends

Cutouts of banknote-portraits from eight different currencies.

Trifter Serie (VIDEO 2007, 720p HD, 8:27 min)

A slow pan along a forest that breaks off at a small terrace in the foreground of the picture: Slender conifers stretch upwards over cut and fallen trunks, dead branches and roots, churned soil and dry grass, and parade past one another, structuring the space to impenetrable depths. The apparent naturalism does not hold up for long. Something is not quite right with this picture, this movement. In the background the trunks begin to stretch out horizontally. Has the image been digitally altered? Have artificial effects been applied to the idyllic scene? Not at all. Instead, the image as a whole turns out to be artificial, its realism the result of elaborate reconstruction. TRIFTER 1 strains at the synapses. Training for the digital. (Thomas Korschil)

Hase / Rabbit / Coniglio, Artesina, Piemont, Italy, 2005

The things one finds wandering in a landscape: familiar things and utterly unknown, like a flower one has never seen before, or, as Columbus discovered, an inexplicable continent;
and then, behind a hill, as if knitted by giant grandmothers, lies this vast rabbit, to make you feel as small as a daisy.
The toilet-paper-pink creature lies on its back: a rabbit-mountain like Gulliver in Lilliput. Happy you feel as you climb up along its ears, almost falling into its cavernous mouth, to the belly-summit and look out over the pink woolen landscape of the rabbitÌs body, a country dropped from the sky;
ears and limbs sneaking into the distance; from its side flowing heart, liver and intestines.
Happily in love you step down the decaying corpse, through the wound, now small like a maggot, over woolen kidney and bowel.
Happy you leave like the larva that gets its wings from an innocent carcass at the roadside.
Such is the happiness which made this rabbit.
i love the rabbit the rabbit loves me.

After almost 5 years of knitting the rabbit found its final place in the italian alps (close to Cuneo). It waits there to be visited by you. You might even take your time or check back every now and then as the rabbit will wait for you 20 years from now on.
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The Bureau of Found Appropriations / Département des Sourires

“The Bureau of Found Appropriations / Département des Sourires” is a work which is part of a long-term study on strategies of appropriation and forms of production (and reproduction) in Asia. My main attention is directed towards differences, misinterpretation and errors committed in the process of translating and copying cultural commodities. How can an image be read, used, interpreted, unterstood without knowing its cultural context?

In 2008 I stayed with Matthias Meinharter for three months in southern China working on the art/film project Chinese Whispers in Dafen – the copy capital of art.  There, approximately up to 10,000 painters live, work and are specialized in copying work in specific styles by a wide range of masters of historical and contemporary oil-painting. Annually, more than five million paintings are produced at assembly lines, usually copies of masterpieces.

The reason why this use of imitations strikes western societies as a serious cultural difference has to do with a strong historical correlation between painting and calligraphy: in China a good copy is often considered as a reward and honour to the technical and compositional skills of the initial inventor and master. Memorization is taught as the manually repeated imitation of an original; hence gaining knowledge is based on a culture of transcription. Therefore the terms of originality and authorship are culturally coded. By regarding these gaps with their potential shifts of meaning as a source of inspiration I started compiling a growing collection of images reflecting on cultural practices, identities and authenticities.

Concept & photos: Nikolaus Gansterer

Materials: Found images and paintings, reproduced as a limited edition of postcards

Venue: Vooruit, Ghent. Curated by Eva de Groote.

Year:  Since 2008

The Eden Experiment

The work is a form of re-installation according to experiments conducted mainly in the 60ties and 70ties to examine the influence of music on the growth of plants. In an intricate test arrangemnet the experiment is started to raise an ‘evil’ and a ‘good’ plant only by sonic irrigation. Two identical model organism (Arabidopsis thaliana) are confroted with a cantata by Johann Sebsatian Bach and a song by the death metal band the Peversists.

The mouse ear cress (Arabidopsis thaliana) is a small flowering plant that – due to fact that its genetic sequence is completely deciphered – is world widely used in life science. By listening to the sound piece the visitors become part of the experiment and part of complex relational system on the edge of art, life science and cultural studies. Large wall maps display crosslinks between the evolution theories and the cultural development of heavy metall music.

The visitors are invited to directly experience the experiment by entering the set up and listening to the acoustic process. The ‘Eden Experiment’ confronts us with a dubious complex system of scientific theories about the influences of sound on living organism and ironically addresses issues of genetic manipulation and reproductive technologies by questioning the imaginary threshold between nature and culture, religion, art and civilization.

Watch video of the performance lecture: Harvesting the Tree of Knowledge (12:00), 2008

Year: Since 2007
Material: Arabidopsis thaliana, wall maps, sound piece (death metal, classic music), lighting and irrigation system, timer, fertilizer,…
Dimensions: ca. 600 x 400 cm

Hamlet (Barbara Sommer)