THE HAGUE, THE NETHERLANDS.- GEM, Museum of Contemporary Art, presents Daniel Pflumm, on view through September 25, 2005. Daniel Pflumm (b. Geneva, 1968) is a Swiss artist who lives and works in Berlin. His work is replete with logos and samples from advertisements and TV programmes. He is active not only as a visual artist, but also as a graphic designer, techno musician and producer. At the GEM, in his first ever one-man show at any museum, Pflumm will exhibit a selection of his recent videos and light boxes reflecting on the visual culture of today.

Pflumm’s work explores our contemporary society and its heavy domination by the media, multinationals and an increasingly commercialised visual culture. Using his chosen means of visual expression, he criticises the influence of such factors on our everyday lives. An example of this kind of work is his video loop Paris (2003), which will occupy the GEM’s main exhibition space. Accompanied by insistent techno music, the loop is a high-speed collage of samples from TV adverts, logos (some manipulated by Pflumm), fragments of news footage and documentary material shot by the artist. The deluge of images is ordered by a process of free association based to some extent on internal visual correspondences and relationships. Pflumm piles up visual clichés to comic effect. There are ludicrous collages of TV adverts showing fruit plunging into dairy desserts, compilations of innumerable logos based on animal shapes, and sequences featuring opulent streams of toffee and toothpaste. Images like these are tellingly intercut with news footage of fleeing crowds, street disturbances and torched vehicles. All is not well in Pflumm’s crisis-ridden globalised universe. The images evoke unmistakeable associations with Naomi Klein’s bestseller No Logo, which reveals how big business is increasingly ruling our daily lives. In his light boxes, Pflumm exhibits abstract and deformed versions of logos. He himself says, ‘I have assessed so many logos, alienated and disfigured them, in a way that I would never previously have thought possible. From German industrial logos to my own I have robbed all logos of their meaning and liberated their form, on videos, on records and T-shirts and in light boxes’. Pflumm is equally at home in the art world as on the club circuit. He owns the Galerie Antik club in Berlin and used to own the Elektro and Panasonic discotheques. In 1995, together with musicians Klaus Kotai and Mo Leschelder, he set up the Elektro Music Department label, which has produced video clips, CDs and T-shirts printed with existing or invented corporate logos. In addition, he makes video works suitable for use in clubs and is active on the Internet.