ART CITIES:Hamburg-Hyper! A Journey Into Art and Music

The group exhibition “Hyper! A Journey Into Art and Music” offer a wide range of experiences with over 300 works, including paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures and installations that deal with music within visual art, as well as numerous hybrid multimedia works that show the reciprocal relationships between music, video, and visual art.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Deichtorhallen-Hamburg Archive

The exhibition “Hyper! A Journey Into Art and Music” at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg and the accompanying program of musical events at the Elbphilharmonie, “HYPER! SOUNDS”, includes more than 60 international artists and musicians who explicitly work between the disciplines of art and music and, often unnoticed by the broader public, decisively integrate references from both these areas into their art. Superstars from the worlds of art and music such as Andreas Gursky, Kim Gordon, Alexander Kluge, Rosemarie Trockel and Wolfgang Tillmans are featured alongside avantgardists such as Arthur Jafa, Thomas Scheibitz, Peter Saville and Arto Lindsay. The exhibition is narratively underpinned by dozens of interviews that the curator of the exhibition Max Dax conducted with the participants in HYPER! in recent years. “Sound, vision, film, destroyed piano: what happens when musicians orient themselves to ideas and strategies from the art world? And what kind of pictures result when painters are influenced by music?” the museum writes. Modern classics such as Peter Saville’s famous dysfunctional giant billboard promoting New Order’s album “Technique” and Emil Schult’s paintings, which formed the basis for the cover of Kraftwerk’s 1974 album “Autobahn”, aree presented alongside stunning 3D video installations such as Cyprien Gaillard’s “Nightlife” (2015) and Britta Thie’s unsettlingly functional “Powerbank” sculptures. “Nightlife” (2015) invites visitors to immerse themselves in a hypnotic, trance-like atmosphere. The 3D-film, a mosaic of scenes with no apparent connection, transports the viewer to a brightly colored urban night. The footage leads from Auguste Rodin’s sculpture “The Thinker” outside the Cleveland Museum of Art via a hallucinatory ballet of juniper trees in Los Angeles (another invasive species) and a spectacular firework display above Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, back to Cleveland to an oak tree presented (as a sapling) to multiple Olympic medal winner Jesse Owens by the Nazis in 1936. Rendered sculptural by the larger-than-life-size projection, these images offer the disturbing and beguiling experience of a heightened perception. This visual and sensory immersion is further heightened by the work’s soundtrack, a mix produced by the artist using samples from two songs by the musician Alton Ellis. The images of the painter and filmmaker Sarah Morris are intensely colorful, geometrically screened and hint at Pop Art like minimalism. The painting “Bad School” (2018) is a diagrammatic, visual realization of the so muted and haunting sound of the voice of Alexander Kluge. Morris abstractively paints the image of an intellectual who is known for his dialogical verbalization of aesthetic content. In doing so, she does not approach the artist and publicist via his physiognomy or his subjects, but rather through the vocal expression of his mental attitude. Taking advantage of the beauty of digital visualization of sounds, she uses the emotional effect of colors: rich orange for medium pitch, yellow green for higher. The influence of Richard Wagner on the work of the performance artist Christoph Schlingensief, who died in 2010, are shown as well as Alexander Kluge’s video commentary to that. Works by Daniel Richter, Sarah Morris, and Bettina Scholz illustrate different ways that music can influence painting, while photographs by Andrea Stappert, Sven Marquardt, and Richard Prince, and video works by Mark Leckey, K Foundation, Nora Lawrenz, and Bettina Pousttchi expand the exhibition into documentary and multimedia. In addition to the exhibition, Albert Oehlen, Rosemarie Trockel together with Thea Djordjadze, and Hans Ulrich Obrist will present concerts in the Elbphilharmonie under the title “HYPER! SOUNDS” featuring Arto Lindsay, Daniel Blumberg, Kristof Schreuf, Den Sorte Skole, GAS, and Kreidler, among others.

Info: Curator: Max Dax, Deichtorhallen-Hamburg, Hall For Contemporary Art, Deichtorplatz 1, Hamburg, Duration: 1/3-4/8/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.deichtorhallen.de and www.elbphilharmonie.de