Hanne Darboven - Klosterfelde

Hanne Darboven was the great chronicler amongst the concept artists. During the forty years of her life’s work, she was consistently concerned with (re-) presentation of time. Based on the early diary-works and sketches from the New York years, 1966-68, she soon developed her own system of notation by means of which she put years, decades, and centuries on paper. The ‘daily arithmetic’ consisting of checksums came to replace the year’s calendrical progression according to a complex and challenging mathematical logic. Her paperwork comprised rows and rows of ascending and descending numbers, u-shapes, grids, line-notations and boxes – the panels of framed pages covered walls and rooms, creating architectures of time. Political, poetical, historical and biographical themes, however, were always integrated also – a tight interleaving of life and work characterizes Hanne Darboven’s specifically subjective point of departure that distinguishes her from other exponents of minimal art of her generation. Her collections of source material amounted to shelves full of folders, to complete musical pieces composed from notes derived from her system of mathematical constructs. Thus, with Darboven visual arts increasingly approach literature and music. In her work, time becomes thinkable not as linear succession, but rather as a synthesis of past, present and future.

The exhibition comprises two large installations that both represent a calculated century. Card Index, Filing Cabinet, Part I was conceived in New York in 1975 for a show at Leo Castelli and consists of ten units of 60 framed pages each. On the left and right sides every page is covered with u-shaped writing in two columns; two cards are mounted in the blank central column showing a differing amount of boxes with corresponding written-out numbers. These represent the smallest and highest checksum-value for each day respectively. The identical sequences of numbers and boxes are arranged on the ten units with the first and last sequential days having been crossed-out in diary fashion, thus offsetting the numbering from panel to panel. Sorted according to frequency of occurrence, the numbers increase or decrease in reverse movement until they have reached factor ten – the turning point. On the index-pages, the work is dedicated to Johann-Jakob Moser who had manufactured a first facsimile of German constitutional law with the aid of index cards.

Adopting musical ways of movement and repetition, Wunschkonzert,1984, was conceived against the background of musical compositions emerging since 1980. It was shown at Documenta 2002 as a collection of lose pages in folders and is presented here for the first time entirely framed. The title refers to the Sunday afternoon musical request programme of the Norddeutscher Rundfunk radio station where felicitations are transmitted also. The work subdivides into Opus 17 a and b and Opus 18 a and b, both consisting of 36 poems respectively, facing each other on the four walls in the exhibition-space. Every poem comprises of six pages including a title page on which a greeting card (for the occasion of a Christian confirmation) has been collaged. Here, reverse rhythmical movements of increasing and decreasing rows of numbers define the system, while the checksum values are either represented in digits and line-notations (17a, 18a) or by means of digits entered into a grid (17b, 18b). Hanne Darboven: ‘My systems are numeric concepts that work according to the laws of progression and/or reduction in the manner of a musical theme with variations.’

Early sketches from the New York period, smaller serial works in pencil and typewritten, as well as selected editions complement the exhibition and correlate to the expansive installations and musical works of the later years.

Hanne Darboven was born in 1941 in Munich and died on March 9, 2009 in Hamburg-Harburg.

For further information or images please contact the gallery.

Opening May 1st 2009, 6 – 9 pm

May 2nd - July 4th 2009

Klosterfelde
Zimmerstrasse 90/91
Berlin 10117
Tel +49 (0)30 283 53 05
office@klosterfelde.de
http://cgi.klosterfelde.de/

Klosterfelde

Comunicato stampa evento: Hanne Darboven

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