NIMk @ Foam Pop-in, August 4 - September 4
Homage to Hanne Darboven, 1, 2, 3;
Thomas Mohr
Opening photographers' exhibition: 11 augustus 2011, 5p.m.
Foam pop-in
Gabriel Metsustraat 2-6.
Open Thursday 11 am – 9 pm, Friday – Sunday 11 am – 7 pm.
Free entrance.
At the Gabriël Metsustraat, off the Museumplein in Amsterdam Foam hosts a temporary space where new work by photographers from the in-house gallery Foam Editions as well as work by emerging talents will be on show. The Netherlands Media Art Institute presents, in a special videoroom in the Pop-in, a monthly presentation of a current work from the NIMk collection.http://www.foam.org/press/2011/foam-pop-in
This month 3 works by Thomas Mohr.
Homage to Hanne Darboven, 1, 2, 3
Thomas Mohr
Hanne Darboven (1941-2009) was a minimal and conceptual artist, best known for her installations consisting large and systematically organized sheets of handwritten text or tables of numbers. Her work is founded on a complex system of calculations, often based upon times and dates. It chronicles existence and evokes the unavoidable linear nature of time.
As a child, Hanne Darboven showed remarkable musical talent. She put this aside in favour of the visual arts, but music kept playing a role in her work. The proximity between a musical variation and Darboven’s handwritten number sequences with variants is obvious. In 1980, the artist started to translate her numerical systems into sequences of music (number 0 = note D, etc), resulting in fascinating sounds: a mixture of ‘mathematical’ and traditional German classical music. Darboven’s Requiem is a good example of this; it was written for organ and became the largest musical work that Darboven completed.
Thomas Mohr is a media artist in whose work systems and processes also play a large role. He refers both to conceptual and abstract tendencies in modern art and to automated, computer-generated processes. In his recent work, he became fascinated by the increase of visual information by digital photography. He uses a personal photo archive containing more than 300,000 pictures taken since 1985, re-organizing them in series and patterns, synthesizing and filtering them and confronting them with conceptual and musical themes and compositions.
2² (zwei hoch zwei) / Hanne Darboven; Duration 5'42”
Thomas Mohr has photographed nine publications by Hanne Darboven, dating from 1971 to 2006, at the Research Centre for Artists’ Publications in Weserburg, Bremen. The resulting series of photographs is processed and serialized as a visual response to a short excerpt from Darboven’s epic Requiem. Hundreds of photos of the interior pages of the artist books blend into each other in a rich variation of patterns and cycles.
544/544 (up/down); Duration 10'09”
Out of eleven CD Volumes of the Requiem of Hanne Darboven, eight have been recorded in St. Petri, the oldest existing church in the city of Hamburg. Darboven’s Requiem itself is based on the conversion of calendar dates into numbers and numbers into musical notes. 1528 photographs explore the church building and its context. Out of these, 1088 document the staircase in the tower. For each step two photos were taken: one up, one down. These pictures are processed frame by frame, in a system of expanding cycles based on exponentiation, approaching infinity.
Two Compositions (Homage to Hanne Darboven); Duration 26'14”
In 'Two Compositions', Thomas Mohr combined a small part of Darboven’s Requiem with a visual flow of photographs. Mohr processes these images in cyclic constructions, following another logic, gradually distorting and filtering them. Both compositions – one based on processing calendrical dates (Darboven), the other on processing chronological photo series (Mohr) – create awareness of the passage of time.
