Between IV: The Secret of Futility
Music & Performances by Bruce Gilbert, AJ Pain, Vera, Nikhil Vettukattil, Stanislav Iordanov, Moritz Nebenführ. Screenings by Michael Clark, Angela Conway, Chris Petit & Iain Sinclair, Martyn Pick, Brothers Quay, Wire.
Between is a series departing from music-based practices, curated by Gloria Hasnay between exhibitions in the Kunstverein’s gallery spaces for the duration of 24 hours. Its fourth edition is programmed by Stanislav Iordanov and Moritz Nebenführ and focuses on the artist and musician Bruce Gilbert.
Aside from his regular gig as guitar operator and lyricist in the English art school band Wire, which he co-founded in the mid 1970s and ultimately resigned from in 2004, Bruce Gilbert has been making noise and sculpting sound as a member of a number of other (non-)groups and projects such as Dome, Cupol, MZUI, P’o, Duet Emmo, A.C. Marias, and IBM. His equally numerous solo releases, meanwhile, are the curved crystal of genre-defining/defying electronic music. After a veiled appearance during a Wire concert, whose shows occasionally borrowed from the vaudevillian antics of Dada, Gilbert was given the nickname Beekeeper, which he soon adopted as his DJ alias. As The Beekeeper he was resident at britpop incubator nightclub Disobey in the mid 1990s, where he played blacked-out optical media in a garden shed suspended above the dancefloor. While many musicians follow a certain trajectory after the first few records, Gilbert’s recent releases and live sets continue to open up new terrain. On Friday evening, he will join us at the Kunstverein for a very special performance of a new piece titled The Secret of Futility, which lends its name to the event. Live support will come from Vera and AJ Pain as well as Moritz Nebenführ as DJ and compère.
The supporting acts are united by their formative encounters with Bruce Gilbert’s music. Vera (Karlsson) are a visual artist and musician making ‘abruptions’ on the London-Berlin continuum, via Frankfurt. They have played everywhere along the way, sometimes as Vanessa Cognizance, Hunterc44t (with Still House Plants’ Finlay Clark), or Dana Rosa. They are also a regular contributor to recent intercontinental club night of note, The Ladies Club. AJ Pain is a waste disposal company in southeast London as well as the music alias of Stanislav Iordanov. His album U-Heads issued on the label A Colder Consciousness in 2019. He has historical affinities with Hype Williams, Bo Khat Eternal Troof Family Band, and John T. Gast. In the last couple of years, Iordanov has turned up in Munich a few times, sometimes on stage as a dog at Kammerspiele, sometimes at the club as DJ 120BPM Days of Sodom, sometimes on Radio 80000. At the moment AJ Pain sounds like lava or plasma.
Much of the material on Gilbert’s early solo albums originated as scores for ballet, contemporary dance, and film, beginning with his Work For Do You Me? I Did (1984), a commission for a piece of the same name by choreographer and frequent collaborator Michael Clark. After Friday’s performances, the gallery space will transform into a cinema for overnight viewing of a selection of Gilbert’s musical works for dance and film, with screenings by many of his collaborators and fellow travelers. On Saturday afternoon, he will join us again for an artist talk, and at dusk will begin a new work by Nikhil Vettukattil, Timepiece (2022), scored by Iordanov and performed by Jana Baldovino, Rosa Luckow and Lennart Boyd Schürmann. Vettukattil is an artist and writer based in Oslo. Using a range of media such as sound, installation, performance, text, sculpture and video, his practice questions modes of representation and image-making processes in their relation to lived experience and historical context. His new piece is a durational action for three or more performers, quadraphonic sound, light and time. Bringing the 24-hour event to a close, it engages with the coincidence and negotiation of times: between the time of labor and the time of clocks, relativity of space time, times observed and times lost.
Supported by the Musikfonds, the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, and the Biehler von Dorrer Stiftung. Photography by Constanza Meléndez.