Artangel

Heiner Goebbels

15 - 27 Apr 2008

Stifter's Dinge presented in Berlin, 2007.
Photographs by Mario Del Curto.

HEINER GOEBBELS
"Stifter's Dinge"

15 – 27 April 2008
P3, Marylebone Road, London NW1

Five grand pianos, insides out, are suspended in the clearing of a forest...
The instruments advance, playing furiously on their own as they glide over the steaming lagoon situated between us and the trees. Elsewhere in the landscape, the disembodied voices of Claude Lévi-Strauss, William S Burroughs and Malcolm X appear and disappear through the foggy darkness of history.
In an extraordinary sculptural installation that is part music box and part landscape painting, Heiner Goebbels' chief protagonists are all objects at the mercy of elemental forces. Stifter's Dinge is a performance with no performers: a series of chain reactions and changing climates of sound, image, text and movement.
In a composition both visual and musical, acclaimed international composer and director Heiner Goebbels takes as his starting point a fragment of text by early 19th century Romantic writer Adalbert Stifter, around which he creates a striking choreography of light and sound, shadowy mechanical objects and extreme weather.
Goebbels' compelling new work occupies an equally remarkable hidden space in central London: the cavernous interior of P3 - a former construction hall where concrete resistance was tested for the building of the M1 motorway.
Set design, lighting and video for Stifter's Dinge by Klaus Grünberg.

Heiner Goebbels
Inspired by an eclectic range of influences and sources, Goebbels' fascination with literature, politics and anthropology informs richly textured visual compositions that integrate classical, pop, jazz and traditional indigenous music. Recent works by Heiner Goebbels in the UK include Songs of Wars I Have Seen (Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, 2007), Eraritjaritjaka (Edinburgh International Festival, 2004) and Hashirigaki (Barbican 2002).
 

Tags: William S. Burroughs