HYPER! A JOURNEY INTO ART AND MUSIC

Sound, vision, film, a destroyed piano: What happens when musicians make use of ideas and strategies from the art world? And what kind of pictures result when painters are influenced by music? To be interested in the lives of others, to pursue the unknown, to copy it, to use it in one’s own work – in short: to conduct a cross-mapping between the worlds of music and the visual arts: this is the subject of the exhibition HYPER! A JOURNEY INTO ART AND MUSIC curated by the former editor-in-chief of Spex and Electronic Beats, Max Dax.

The exhibition 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 will be featured alongside avant-gardists such as Arthur Jafa, Thomas Scheibitz, Peter Saville, and Arto Lindsay. The exhibition is narratively underpinned by dozens of interviews that Max Dax conducted with the participants in HYPER! in recent years.

The exhibition HYPER! will offer a wide-range of experiences with almost 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.

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, will be presented alongside stunning 3D video installations such as Cyprien Gaillard’s Night Life (2015) and Britta Thie’s unsettlingly functional Powerbanks sculptures.

The influence of Richard Wagner on the work of the performance artist Christoph Schlingensief, who died in 2010, will be shown, as well as Alexander Kluge’s video commentary. 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, The KLF, Nora Lawrenz, and Bettina Pousttchi expand the exhibition into the documentary and multimedia.

In addition to the exhibition, Albert Oehlen, Rosemarie Trockel, 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. HYPER! will open on 28 February 2019 with a concert by Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle (F.S.K.) under the theme “A pile of shit and a smashed piano,” in which the rock music tradition of destroying electric guitars on stage will be combined with the Fluxus practice of destroying pianos. Additional concerts with Marcel Dettmann, Asmus Tietchens, and André Vida are planned.