On Hanne Darboven / 24 Songs

On Friday April 29, German artist Hanne Darboven would have celebrated her 75th birthday. For this occasion the work On Hanne Darboven / 24 Songs will be screened continuously. Hanne Darboven (1941-2009) was a radical representative of the conceptual art movement. Through systematic drawings of number sequences, and occasionally through photographs and notes, she attempted to create order in everyday life. In the 1980s, Darboven began to convert her numerical systems into musical sequences (in which, for instance, the number 0 represents the D-note, et cetera), resulting in a fascinating mixture of 'mathematical' and traditional German classical music. Her monumental piece 24 Gesänge: B-Form / 24 Songs: B-Form (1974),part of the collection of the Stedelijk Museum, was on display last year. Inspired by this work, German artist Thomas Mohr created the video work On Hanne Darboven / 24 Songs.

Thomas Mohr has focused intensively on Hanne Darboven’s work for years. He too uses various mathematical systems and processes when creating his experimental video works. For his piece On Hanne Darboven / 24 Songs he precisely photographed 2.160 images from Darboven's same-titled artwork into a grid-like structure, with the images moving rhythmically to Darboven’s composition