Slow Dance (1) at Stadtgalerie Bern

Artists: Eli Coplan, Yuki Kimura, The KLF, Miriam Laura Leonardi, Potato Maze, Plumber’s Nightmare, Hisachika Takahashi, Wickiana

Exhibition title: Slow Dance (1)

Curated by: Luca Beeler & Richard Sides

Venue: Stadtgalerie Bern, Bern, Switzerland

Date: March 3 – April 1, 2023

Photography: Studio Mussano / all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Stadtgalerie, Bern

Slow Dance is composed of sixteen scenes, consisting of 4 different rooms in four exhibitions over a peri- od of six months. During this time, the exhibition spaces remain structured by two walls, each with a functioning door. Instead of providing an overview, they offer passages. Slow Dance could describe the attitudes of a person in conversation as they attempt to provoke reactions in other people. Here, what slowly comes into focus is the political implications of subliminal choreography.

Slow Dance (1) grows out of an ongoing conversation around the convergence between the specificities of exhibition making and installation. The artworks and objects cohabiting within the structure of the exhibition form an interconnected logic that mirrors living in constant relationship with various active temporalities and timescales. How we encounter the material world is at once a form of compromise whilst simultaneously an experience of precarious accumulation. Scale, growth and history confuse our sense of ideology. Organic rhythms zoom out from media realities.

The artworks in Slow Dance (1) offer a specific glance at systems of broadcast, technology and governance. Sampling and appropriation hijack the timescale, just as the spatial envelopes these behaviours.

The BitTorrent protocol allows large networks of computers to upload and download pieces of data from each other cooperatively rather than relying on centralized servers. The system is vastly more efficient than what consumer streaming services can offer in terms of speed, scale and quality. BitTorrent networks also make possible the distribution and preservation of alternative media. There exists a worldwide, underground, organized network of pirate groups that specialize in obtaining and distributing copyrighted digital media to clandestine networks for free. ELI COPLAN’s Silent Movies (2023) is a collection of over one hundred movies, released in theaters and on streaming platforms between late 2022 and early 2023, played without audio in a computationally-randomized sequence. The movies are each in Full HD resolution at the highest bitrate available and in this iteration have a combined duration of about 250 hours.

In 1969, HISACHIKA TAKAHASHI moved to the US. Shortly thereafter and for a period of about 3 years, he made collages from printed material found in widely available media such as Life Magazine, Esquire, Playboy and Scientific America. The collages group together ubiquitous motifs from a media reality at the turn of the Vietnam war, the Flower Power years and the race into space. Takahashi draws from Pop Art’s direct politicization of imagery to reveal what underlying narratives emerge by way of printed facts and apparitions.

A visual way to explore science, the POTATO MAZE experiment turns a simple box into a plant obstacle course. Over time, the potato plant winds its way through the maze in search of sunlight.

Chill Out is the third studio album by British duo THE KLF, released on 5 February 1990. This ambient concept album features a vast range of samples, including Elvis Presley, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, Van Halen, Tuvan throat singing, radio evangelists, 808 State and field recordings portraying a mystical night-time journey through the US Gulf Coast states from Texas to Louisiana. The album’s concept and title spurred a form of music developed to be experienced ‘chilling out’ in the after hours of 90s rave dance culture. The duo never traveled to the USA.

YUKI KIMURA’s door closer follows from a principle of usefulness. The work is an exact replica – produced by a craftsman in Marseille – of a Gothic clasp discovered by the artist during a visit to a convent in the south of France.

The 3D Pipes screensaver, which spontaneously generates a variety of 3D pipes in different colours, also known as THE PLUMBER’s NIGHTMARE, was included in the Windows operating system from Windows 98 to Windows XP (2001).

MIRIAM LAURA LEONARDI’s Lunatic Duck (2021) consists of an antique hammered tin duck mounted on a robotic device. Powered by lithium batteries identical to those used by Tesla for their electric cars and defaced with the word «Lunatic» in the Disney font. The moving sculpture is bound by the architecture it is presented within as it senses the limits of the space and roves endlessly.

The WICKIANA is a collection of news from the 16th century by Johann Jakob Wick (1522-1588), a priest from Zurich. From 1559 to 1588, he chronologically compiled current testimonies of the then known world. The collection contains compiled epistolary news, broadsheets or illustrated pamphlets. They are a testimony to the Reformers’ apocalyptic understanding of history.