UND EINE WELT NOCH "...and yet one more world"
Kunsthaus Hamburg
26th April – 26th June, 2016
Curated by Miriam Schoofs and Katja Schroeder.
Georges Adéagbo & Alfredo Jaar, Ayreen Anastas & Rene Gabri, Anna Artaker & Meike S. Gleim, Fiona Banner, Irma Blank, Heath Bunting, Banu Cennetoğlu, Alejandro Cesarco, Armin Chodzinski, Daniela Comani, Martin Creed, Natalie Czech, Hanne Darboven, Cevdet Erek, Isa Genzken, Flora Hauser, Robert Heinecken, Ydessa Hendeles, Channa Horwitz, Nick Koppenhagen, Tim Lee, Sol LeWitt, Lucy R. Lippard, Almir Mavignier, Jonathan Monk, Susan Morris, Michael Müller, Matt Mullican, Henrik Olesen, Ulrike Ottinger, Lia Perjovschi, Michael Riedel, Arno Schmidt, Barbara Schmidt Heins, Sigrid Sigurdsson, Fiete Stolte, Josef Strau, Rayyane Tabet, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Jorinde Voigt, Tris Vonna-Michell, Hannah Weiner, Lawrence Weiner.
In the context of the exhibition “…and yet one more world,” presented by Kunsthaus Hamburg, the oeuvre of the seminal German Conceptual artist Hanne Darboven (1941– 2009) serves as a starting point for an exploration of its present-day impact and relevance from the perspective of a younger generation of international artists.
Accompanied by a small selection of works created by Darboven’s contemporaries (among these artist colleagues such as Almir Mavignier, Sol LeWitt, and Lawrence Weiner), the exhibition focuses specifically on protagonists of contemporary art, who are engaged in questions and strategies similar to those that Darboven investigated in her work.
Darboven’s characteristic conflation of an abstract, overarching framework and individual self-assertion are resonant in the sign structures conceived, for example, by Channa Horwitz or Michael Müller, as well as in the textual works and writing systems of Fiona Banner, Irma Blank, and Natalie Czech, in the temporal processes of Sigrid Sigurdsson, the appropriation of history practiced by Daniela Comani, Lia Perjovschi, and Rayyane Tabet, or in the collages conjoining current events and popular culture created by Isa Genzken and Robert Heinecken, as well as in the encyclopedic, material-based classification systems of Henrik Olesen and Joëlle Tuerlinckx.
Already during her lifetime, Hanne Darboven achieved fame as a museum artist, entering into the canon of Minimal and Conceptual art of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Yet, to this day, she also retains her status as an artist extraordinaire, inspiring a young generation of artists in spite of – or precisely because of – the hermetic character of her work. On the one hand, Darboven’s oeuvre is defined by the contrast between a programmatic mechanization of aesthetic production procedures, and, on the other hand, by radical cross-references to the artist’s own biography and personal identity. This results in conflicting energies that appear to be incompatible with the self-image of Conceptual art and its emphasis on rationalization since the 1960’s: in employing her handwriting as a medium and assembling material-informed montages, Darboven is, furthermore inserting a subjective ductus into her conceptual works, literally inscribing her own life-time, the span in which her works were written, into these: “am burgberg – heute … und keine worte mehr … und eine welt noch.” (“at the burgberg – today … and no more words … and yet one more world”).
Finally, due to both the rational structure of her media-spanning, multi-layered works and her diverse spectrum of subject-related references to music, literature, and European cultural history, Hanne Darboven prefigures strategies and discourses of aesthetic knowledge production and mediation in current art.
With their obsessive nature and encyclopedic magnitude, Darboven’s visualizations of time and recent history, as well as the collection, selection, and rearrangement of knowledge in form of handwritten excerpts, photographic, literary, and journalistic documents of cultural history, bear witness to the artist’s attempt to counter the information flood and the alleged chaos of the (post-) modern world by creating an autonomous classification system and by placing herself in an individual framework of meaning.
The group exhibition “…and yet one more world” encompasses a broad spectrum of contemporary aesthetic strategies of addressing systems of knowledge and current events. These include autonomous recording and narrative systems, the investigation of temporal structures, and the material-based aesthetic and media-spanning conflation of personal time concepts and of contemporary history and current events.Participating artists:
Georges Adéagbo & Alfredo Jaar, Ayreen Anastas & Rene Gabri, Anna Artaker & Meike S. Gleim, Fiona Banner, Irma Blank, Heath Bunting, Banu Cennetoğlu, Alejandro Cesarco, Armin Chodzinski, Daniela Comani, Martin Creed, Natalie Czech, Hanne Darboven, Cevdet Erek, Isa Genzken, Flora Hauser, Robert Heinecken, Ydessa Hendeles, Channa Horwitz, Nick Koppenhagen, Tim Lee, Sol LeWitt, Lucy R. Lippard, Almir Mavignier, Jonathan Monk, Susan Morris, Michael Müller, Matt Mullican, Henrik Olesen, Ulrike Ottinger, Lia Perjovschi, Michael Riedel, Arno Schmidt, Barbara Schmidt Heins, Sigrid Sigurdsson, Fiete Stolte, Josef Strau, Rayyane Tabet, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Jorinde Voigt, Tris Vonna-Michell, Hannah Weiner, Lawrence Weiner.
Curated by Miriam Schoofs (art historian, Berlin/Hamburg) and Katja Schroeder (artistic director, Kunsthaus Hamburg).
From 1st January 2010 to December 31st, 2012 I wore an Actiwatch (a scientific/medical device) that recorded my sleep/wake patterns plus the levels of ambient light in my immediate environment. I had to download the recorded data every three weeks – something I forgot to do on a few occasions. The 'zero data' resulting from these lapses in memory show up on the tapestries as 'blanks' where I reversed the weave, so that what is usually behind - ie the back or underneath of the tapestry - was brought to the front. You can also see the few minutes of downloading time on the tapestries, when again nothing is recorded, and which show up every approx 21 days, usually in the evenings. The two most obvious blanks, which show up as parallel lines intersecting the image, occurred in 2011, when I was moving house. Other personal incidents revealed by the recordings include two trips to NYC where I passed into a different time zone.
I have made tapestries that show activity only, light only, and some that combine the two data streams. At the end of 2012 I was given a new watch that recorded activity only but for periods of up six months instead of only three weeks, so I continued with this for another two years in order to make the ‘five year’ tapestries.
The tapestry exhibited in Hamburg shows the amount of light (natural and artificial) that a subject (me) living in a northern European city during a period of late capitalism was exposed to over three years. Making recordings for long time periods draws attention to rhythms and repetitive activities that extend beyond a single calendrical year; things external to me such as the earth’s movement round the sun. However, it remains clear that the subject being recorded is still embedded in clock time - even when you are only looking at recordings of light. So it’s a kind of diary of a body.
I used different coloured weft yarns to represent each day of the week.
Monday - Dark blue
Tuesday - Yellow
Wednesday - Purple
Thursday - Green
Friday - red
Saturday - Light blue
Sunday - Natura
l1st Jan 2010 was a Friday.
2012 was a leap year so there are 1096 recorded days that run down the tapestry at varying levels of density - like lines of chalk on a blackboard. Of course the weft goes right across the loom but it is covered or revealed by the warp to reflect the levels of light recorded - ie it is completely obscured during periods of darkness. I like the way the tapestry becomes almost monochrome when viewed at a distance - as if it has been bleached by the sun. (This also evokes a photogram.)
Night occupies the bottom third of the tapestry with evening along the top section - time travels from left to right beginning at 00:00 hrs on 1st Jan 2010 at the bottom left hand corner. The recording ends at 24:00 hrs on 31st December 2012.
You can see the changes of light intensity across the seasons as we go from January through spring into autumn and winter, passing through three summers. You can also see the difference between natural - the most intense - and artificial light, which shows in the top third of the tapestry. Living mainly in London I am exposed to a lot of light pollution, plus I tend to work late into the night under electric lighting – in this way the time for sleeping is slowly eaten up by work and social pressures. Only about a third of my time is spent in what the philosopher Hannah Arendt has described as “the darkness of sheltered existence, [a] twilight that suffuses our private and intimate lives.” Without this time or space for privacy, as Jonathan Crary* argues, the singularity of selfhood is eroded.”
* Crary , J, 2013, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Verso