Distant Bodies Dancing Eyes Friday to Sunday, July 9–11, 2021, 3–10 P.M
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
THE SCHIRN IS PRESENTING MUSIC VIDEOS BY INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS IN EIGHT CLUBS IN FRANKFURT AND OFFENBACH DISTANT BODIES DANCING EYES FRIDAY TO SUNDAY, JULY 9–11, 2021, 3–10 P.M. GIBSON CLUB, HAFEN 2, KUNSTVEREIN FAMILIE MONTEZ, NACHTLEBEN, ROBERT JOHNSON, SILBERGOLD, TANZHAUS WEST, YACHTKLUB DAY TICKET FOR ALL VENUES 10 EUROS, EARLY-BIRD-TICKET 8 EUROS, 3-DAY TICKET 20 EUROS ADVANCE SALES START ON JUNE 22, 2021 AT SCHIRN.DE/CLUBWALK PRESS PREVIEW: JULY 8, 2021, 11 A.M. From July 9 to 11, 2021, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is dedicating itself to the music video as an artistic genre and is combining the viewing of art with the best sounds on the local club scene. The exhibition “Distant Bodies Dancing Eyes” presents contemporary music video art at eight venues in Frankfurt and Offenbach. For one summer weekend, visitors are invited to finally go clubbing again and to experience selected music videos by twenty-five international artists on a big screen and with optimal sound quality at GIBSON CLUB, HAFEN 2, KUNSTVEREIN FAMILIE MONTEZ, NACHTLEBEN, ROBERT JOHNSON, SILBERGOLD, TANZHAUS WEST, and YACHTKLUB. All of the music videos being shown are current productions from the last two decades, the oldest being from 2004. The exhibition shows artists who predominantly work with the mediums of photography and video art. The films created to music frequently include elements from their artistic work and make it possible to recognize the personal touch of their creator. Musically, the focus is particularly on rhythm and blues, pop, and electronic pieces. In the 1980s, music videos first became popular thanks to broadcasters like MTV. They provided an abundance of creative impulses and brought together producers of art from various fields. In recent years, visual artists have increasingly contributed moving images to accompany the music. This also reflects the great interest in video and sound in the art of today as well as the close connection between (and shared awareness of producers of music and art. The music videos in the exhibition put social conflicts and upheaval at the center of the action, design mysterious locations and utopian scenarios, interrogate temporal, spatial, and physical constants, or penetrate deeply into human emotions. At each of the exhibition venues, which can be visited individually, one can see three video works, grouped under superordinate themes like utopia, love, gender, social conflict, social exclusion, technology, humanity, or science fiction. The exhibition “Distant Bodies Dancing Eyes” is supported by the City of Frankfurt am Main and the SCHIRN ZEITGENOSSEN. Matthias Ulrich, the curator of the exhibition, explains: “Especially in recent years, the music video has become established as a medium for artistic collaboration and experimentation. As a result of its media reach, it also has the potential to appeal to various generations or to bring together (sub-)cultures from around the world. Selected works can now be experienced during a three-day festival of music video art in clubs in Frankfurt, facilitate new perspectives on this interdisciplinary art form, and draw attention to the current lack of club culture at the same time.” SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT, PRESS RELEASE “DISTANT BODIES DANCING EYES,” June 23, 2021, PAGE 1 OF 4 OVERVIEW OF THE CLUBS AND ARTWORK IN THE EXHIBITION GIBSON CLUB In the center of the city of Frankfurt, the Gibson Club has been offering since 2012 a broad musical spectrum, including urban music, house, hip-hop, and rhythm and blues. During the exhibition at this venue, visitors can see the work of the photographer Ryan McGinley (b. 1977, Ramsey, New Jersey, USA), which designs a dreamlike, utopian portrait of Manhattan for Sigur Rós’s Varúð (2012). Colin Whitaker (b. 1980, Portland, Maine, USA) also created utopian reflections in his music video for Paradise (2017) by Anohni. Between colorful cross-fading into nature and archival recordings from the legendary club Paradise Garage in New York, the model and artist Eliza Douglas embodies Anohni’s voice with a direct gaze into the camera. The Schirn is also presenting the video by Jacolby Satterwhite (b. 1986, Columbia, South Carolina, USA) for Sound of Rain (2019) by Solange at this venue. HAFEN 2 In Offenbach, the Hafen 2 cultural center, which was originally established as an interim solution for using an old locomotive shed from the harbor railway, has meanwhile become a permanent institution directly on the Main River, where live concerts and house parties are hosted, along with café operations, a program cinema, and many other uses. Here, the Schirn is presenting the video for Leonard Cohen’s posthumously released Moving On (2020) by Laure Prouvost (b. 1978, Lille, France) in collaboration with Ciarán Wood (b. 1988, Liverpool, UK). In it, the camera follows the musician’s thoughts about a past love on the Greek island of Hydra, into the timelessness of memory. The work by Doug Aitken (b. 1968, Redondo Beach, California, USA) for Someone Great (2007) by LCD Soundsystem also deals with loss and the simultaneous presence and absence of a beloved individual. For the concept band from New York, he developed a clip in which memory as a shadow of a past life can be seen between enlarged details of day-to-day life. Also being shown at this venue is the video by Tony Oursler (b. 1957, New York, USA) for David Bowie’s song Where Are We Now?—a homage to the Berlin of the 1970s—which was released in 2013. KUNSTVEREIN FAMILIE MONTEZ Another station in the exhibition is the Kunstverein Familie Montez in Frankfurt’s Osthafen, with a multifaceted program that includes exhibitions, talks, film programs, performances, the Jazz Montez concerts, and legendary parties. To the fluid undertow of the piece Life Guarding (2020), the photographer and musician Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968, Remscheid, Germany) has arranged his well-known images of male bodies as collages and combined them with sequences of a drop of water on a heated hot plate and crashing ocean waves. Elizaveta Porodina (b. 1987, Moscow, Russia) translates the music of Mavi Phoenix’s song Boys Toys (2019) into sequences of black-and-white images, centered on a gender-fluid singer emerging from the water. For the video accompanying her song Sweet Days of Discipline (2020), the artist and musician Johanna Odersky (b. 1993, Karlsruhe, Germany), alias Iku, collaborated with her friend and artist Nadia Perlov (b. 1990, Tel Aviv, Israel). With a fish-eye lens, the camera films the singer as a fairy-like figure on a flowering mountain meadow in an enchanting staging. NACHTLEBEN The venue Nachtleben in the center of Frankfurt has been known since 1993 for its rock, pop, indie, and underground parties, as well as live concerts in the basement. Anton Corbijn (b. 1955, Strijen, Netherlands), in his familiar black-and-white images to the song Talk (2005), stages the band Coldplay as the crew of a spaceship that lands on a black planet and encounters a huge robot. In his video for A Blood Sample (2004) by Losoul, Thomas Draschan (b. 1967 Linz, Austria) works with found footage, which he interweaves with the sounds and text of the song. The collaging of advertising trailers for fashionable accessories and pictures of planets and biochemical formulas conjures up a near future and collective desire, which comes alive with the SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT, PRESS RELEASE “DISTANT BODIES DANCING EYES,” June 23, 2021, PAGE 2 OF 4 advent of TV sets in home living rooms of the 1970s. Also being presented here is the work future past perfect pt. 03 (u_08-1) (2009) by Carsten Nicolai (b. 1965, Chemnitz, Germany). ROBERT JOHNSON Age 16 and above Robert Johnson in Offenbach, which is named for the legendary Blues musician, opened in 1999 with a top-quality sound system and is one of the best electronic clubs in the world. The music video created by Arthur Jafa (b. 1960, Tupelo, Mississippi, USA) for Kanye West’s song Wash Us In The Blood (2020), which is being presented at this venue, has an insistent, explosive power. Jafa combines video footage from social media to create a brutal mix of racist violence and ghettoized life on the street, in which dangerous, high-horsepower car acrobatics, gang rivalries, and the ecstatic beat of rap and hip-hop merge. The video by Jon Rafman (b. 1981, Montréal, Canada) for Oneohtrix Point Never’s song Sticky Drama (2015) also involves images of a battle between armed children dressed in garbage. With her album 99¢, the singer Santigold draws attention to self-exploitation in the music industry. The video for her song Banshee (2016) shows the musician holding a sign with the text “Will Work for Blood” or “Will Blood for Work” on the sidewalk of New York’s gallery district in Chelsea. It was created in collaboration with the photographer and filmmaker Ari Marcopoulos (b. 1957, Amsterdam, Netherlands), who directed the video, and the artist Kara Walker (b. 1969, Stockton, California, USA), in whose studio the majority of the video takes place, with the singer and the artist being visited by various figures in Walker’s characteristic cut-paper silhouettes. SILBERGOLD Silbergold in Frankfurt, known for its fantastic sound system and light design, is particularly popular with electronic music enthusiasts and plays not only techno and house, but also indie, soul, or drum and bass. The video work by Nina Könnemann (b. 1971, Bonn, Germany) for Tocotronic’s Ich will für dich nüchtern bleiben (2013) portrays an older man collecting bottles in a club and cleaning up the remains of the party. But her film showing his day-to-day struggle to survive is not an accusation; it is instead a study of pride and prejudice in the neoliberal age.