Cerith Wyn Evans
… in which something happens all over again for the very first time
25.11.06-25.02.07
Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and Kunstbau, Munich
Luisenstraße 33 . 80333 Munich . Germany
Cerith Wyn Evanss artistic career goes back to the London underground scene of the late 1970s, when he worked closely with the British filmmakers Derek Jarman and John Maybury and was a protagonist in the avant-garde film movement known as the New Romantics. During the 1980s, Evans worked on a number of experimental 8mm and 16mm films, in which he broke with the ascetic language of conceptual film and introduced a new form of visual opulence, theatricality and symbolic physicality into film discourse.
In the 1990s, Cerith Wyn Evans extended his means of expression. He produced photo series and also sculptural and installation works, in which he further developed his interest in the multi-layered cognitive and semiotic structures of perception. Using references to works of literature, philosophy, music, the natural sciences, film and art history, and also pursuing an aesthetic form influenced by Surrealism, Pre-Pop and the situationist utopias of the 1960s and 1970s, Evans created visual and intellectual kaleidoscopes with a highly individual language. In his installations, text and light came to play an increasingly significant role alongside associative objects such as plants and design objects. Language and its translation became the vehicle for Cerith Wyn Evans to address the subject of identity, and light became the medium by which he seduces the viewer into irritating, psychedelic and bottomless worlds.
In the Kunstbau at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus Cerith Wyn Evans is showing a choreography of works in which he combines chandeliers from different epochs with citations from literature, the natural sciences and philosophy. The texts are translated into Morse code and transmitted via the flashing lights of the chandeliers. At the same time the process of translation is screened on monitors in the background. The citations are taken from the artists own personal collection of texts, forming a polyphony of divergent genres: letters, poems, novels, conversations, science-fiction, scientific and philosophical works. The illegibility of the texts in the outdated language of Morse code shows that Cerith Wyn Evans is not concerned with universal readability but rather with deception, illusion and the loss of meaning, with those gaps in communication where the irrational, the disfunctional and the eccentric break through.
In the exhibition, this choreography is accompanied by three neon texts by the artist. Cerith Wyn Evans has also invited the artist Florian Hecker to compose an acoustic piece for the exhibition. Asynchronous Jitter, Selective Hearing is a 37-minute long 4-channel composition in combination with a 14-channel computer-controlled spatialisation system. Staged literally in the center of the exhibition, the spatio- sonic structure of the piece re-reflects the wave-particle nature of the works surrounding it.
The Munich show in the Kunstbau is the dark counterpart to a light show in the daylit rooms of the Musée dArt moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC, which took place this summer. The exhibition is accompanied by a book which was produced in cooperation with Paris-Musées and designed by the graphic designers M/M, Paris.
