John Bock
30 Apr - 04 Jun 2011
JOHN BOCK
Ohr-Walachei
30 April - 4 June, 2011
Gallery Klosterfelde is very pleased to present John Bock’s exhibition on the occasion of this year’s Gallery Weekend. The installation, entitled Ohr-Walachei, is specifically conceived for this gallery space.
While FischGrätenMelkStand (2010), John Bock’s latest major exhibition project in Berlin for the Temporäre Kunsthalle, still offered an abundance of visual impressions, here, in contrast, there is nothing to see on first sight. Nothing is added to the gallery space. Only various elements of the rooms’ architectural structure such as window casements, doors and doorknobs, as well as a skirting board, seem to be set into motion just by themselves.
They close and open again, rattle and clatter to and fro, and thus create a cacophonic, at times poetic, but mostly rather irritating and even nerve-wracking background noise. Its flows and rhythms are quasi composed by the artist by means of a sketched score. Already the title is a reference to a world of raw sounds: the Walachei (Ohr means ear), a bit of a now dated derogatory and colloquial term for a place way far out, beyond the polished and cultivated civilization.
Through these subtle mechanical interventions, Bock makes the space speak, draw attention to itself. The performing artist has stepped back almost entirely, the space as resonating body became the actor, the protagonist. Similar to Bock’s installation at the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin, the space is the focus, the shell that again provides space for something else – there, the works of the invited artists, here, the gallery space’s many tales forming an idiosyncratic kind of soundscape.
In this minimalist yet highly animated “loud-white” installation, newly defining the white cube, the visitor becomes somehow collaborator when activating triggers that set the space in motion. The viewer, or better his or her interpretation, may also serve as mirror for the space’s narratives while individual memories of the historic apartment are merging with the universal myths of Walachei.
Ohr-Walachei
30 April - 4 June, 2011
Gallery Klosterfelde is very pleased to present John Bock’s exhibition on the occasion of this year’s Gallery Weekend. The installation, entitled Ohr-Walachei, is specifically conceived for this gallery space.
While FischGrätenMelkStand (2010), John Bock’s latest major exhibition project in Berlin for the Temporäre Kunsthalle, still offered an abundance of visual impressions, here, in contrast, there is nothing to see on first sight. Nothing is added to the gallery space. Only various elements of the rooms’ architectural structure such as window casements, doors and doorknobs, as well as a skirting board, seem to be set into motion just by themselves.
They close and open again, rattle and clatter to and fro, and thus create a cacophonic, at times poetic, but mostly rather irritating and even nerve-wracking background noise. Its flows and rhythms are quasi composed by the artist by means of a sketched score. Already the title is a reference to a world of raw sounds: the Walachei (Ohr means ear), a bit of a now dated derogatory and colloquial term for a place way far out, beyond the polished and cultivated civilization.
Through these subtle mechanical interventions, Bock makes the space speak, draw attention to itself. The performing artist has stepped back almost entirely, the space as resonating body became the actor, the protagonist. Similar to Bock’s installation at the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin, the space is the focus, the shell that again provides space for something else – there, the works of the invited artists, here, the gallery space’s many tales forming an idiosyncratic kind of soundscape.
In this minimalist yet highly animated “loud-white” installation, newly defining the white cube, the visitor becomes somehow collaborator when activating triggers that set the space in motion. The viewer, or better his or her interpretation, may also serve as mirror for the space’s narratives while individual memories of the historic apartment are merging with the universal myths of Walachei.