DUSSELDORF.- The exhibition presents a comprehensive survey of the oeuvre of the visual artist and musician Carsten Nicolai, who has worked on the intersections between fine art, music, and natural science since the early 1990s. Electronically controlled sound and light are the materials out of which Nicolai molds minimalist installations, acoustic performances, and visualizations of physical phenomena that reflect systems and structures of the media universe. Under the pseudonym Alva Noto, Nicolai is also a widely acclaimed practitioner of contemporary electronic music. Following his participations in documenta X (1997) and the 2001 and 2003 Venice Biennales, which put him on the map as a visual artist, he has shown his work around the world. At
K21, he organized the spacious downstairs exhibition hall as an open set with a dual structure accommodating the presentation of his works, many of which solicit the viewer’s interaction.
The exhibition’s title, “Parallax Symmetry,” alludes to the physical phenomenon known as parallax (from ancient Greek parállaxis, “change, alternating motion”): the apparent displacement of an object’s position when the vantage point shifts. The basis of the visual perception of depth, it is also taken into account in the design of photo cameras and used by astronomers to measure the exact distance of a celestial object. The symmetry of the exhibition is derived from the polarity of black and white, as well as of light and dark, processed in different ways. The classic white cube of modernism encounters the traditional black box of cinematographic presentation. Light and darkness, noise and silence, visibility and invisibility are other pairs of opposites that Nicolai’s creative practice harnesses to great effect. Contrasts are teased apart and unfold into a wide spectrum of meanings; as in an instance of parallax, they effect a perpetual slippage of perception that defies determination and disambiguation.
The survey of Nicolai’s oeuvre opens with early works dating from around 2000 up to now such as “nebelkammer” / ”cloud chamber” (2002), “telefunken anti” (2004), “magnetic static” (2005), “void” (2007), and “tele” (2018). In the sound installation “particle noise” (2013), an analog and a digital Geiger counter measure the ionizing radiation on the scene and translate it into acoustic signals. Phenomena that are imperceptible to the human senses such as radioactivity are raised to a different perceptual level and converted into a soundtrack born of the terrestrial and extraterrestrial environment.
In a first, the exhibition also showcases selected pieces from “future past perfect,” a series of videos on which Nicolai has worked since 2006. Each segment of the cycle, an ongoing major project, consists of footage playing in a loop that speaks to Nicolai’s fascination for formations in motion such as clouds, vapor, mist, and water as well as for architectural and sculptural patterns and details in structures such as Le Corbusier’s Cité radieuse in Rezé near Nantes.
In the exhibition’s dark section, the sound installation “unicolor” (2014), which probes the psychology of color perception, welcomes visitors as a sprawling display. Sixteen modules playing through the combinatorics of different visual color effects make for an arresting sight in a space that seems to extend ad infinitum. With its stage-like setup and coupling of sound and image, “unicolor” marks the linkage between Carsten Nicolai’s art and the visuals accompanying Alva Noto’s performances.
The media-historical conjunction of visual art and music, of scientific knowledge, technical equipment, and poetry, is articulated by the work “ur-geräusch”/ “primal sound” (2019), for which Nicolai took inspiration from a 1919 essay of the same title by Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke describes how, in his high-school physics class, he was introduced to the phonograph (then hardly a new device; it was invented in the mid-nineteenth century). Years later, as he hears a lecture on anatomy at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the sight of the “crown suture of the skull” reminds him of the perforation of the cylinder on which the phonograph’s sound is recorded. Nicolai chose this fairly obscure text from Rilke’s oeuvre and recruited the actress Juke Böwe (German) and the lyric poet Ann Cotton (English) to record it. Visitors are encouraged to pick up audio-guide-style headsets and listen to Rilke’s reflections on the “primal sound” as a literary cicerone of sorts as they tour the exhibition.
More than a decade after Nicolai’s solo exhibitions at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt am Main (2005), and Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich (2007), “Parallax Symmetry” invites the public to discover the rich oeuvre the artist has built since 2000. As a special highlight, Alva Noto will give a concert on K21’s piazza on January 18, 2020. The Düsseldorf-based artist and musician Phillip Schulze and his students at the Robert Schumann Hochschule will design a program of events titled “Sonification” (the translation of data into sounds).
Carsten Nicolai (b. Karl-Marx-Stadt, now Chemnitz, 1965) lives and works in Berlin. After studying landscape architecture at the TU Dresden from 1985 until 1990, he cofounded the cultural and community center Voxxx in Chemnitz in 1992 and, in 1994, established the label NOTON. Archiv für ton und nichtton, which merged with another label in 1999 to become raster-noton. Since 1990, he has received numerous awards (Zurich Art Prize, 2007; Giga-Hertz Award for Electronic Music, ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, 2012; Grand Prize at the 17th Japanese Media Arts Festival, Tokyo, 2014) and fellowships (Villa Aurora, Los Angeles, 2003; Villa Massimo, Rome, 2007) and presented his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions. In 2015, he was appointed professor of digital and timebased media at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. Nicolai lives and works in Berlin.
Curator: Doris Krystof
Assistant curator: Linda Walther
