,,Im Schwarm”
(In The Swarm)
Spatial installation in the pavilion of the Gerhard Marcks House in Bremen, exhibited from November 7, 2021, to February 13, 2022
The fourth collaboration between visual artist Dina Koper and composer Christoph Ogiermann is a visual-electroacoustic project. The basic structure of the installation consists of expansive paper cut-outs that fill the space and are assembled from countless images and drawings by Koper. Light and video projections cast onto these cut-outs continuously generate new sculptural spatial impressions. Ogiermann’s multichannel composition for the project is an electroacoustic work created from unstable oscillating circuits, evoking “natural” swarm phenomena. On various levels of meaning, the work revolves around themes such as swarms, thickets, as well as sexuality, myth, and the body.
For the creation of the hanging paper elements, Koper reproduced her own watercolor drawings of female reproductive organs together with found historical studies of insects. These images were mounted onto paper in such a way that large-scale suspended forms could be cut out. Through the interplay of their positive shapes and negative spaces, the resulting paper works provide an ideal surface for film projections of natural swarms, creating an environment that becomes completely occupied by the concept of „The Swarm.”
The flight of insects is equated here with freedom, intoxication, and orgasmic states. At the same time, the work questions the fear of insects, which seems to stem from a primordial anxiety similar to that associated with the primordial fear of female sexuality.
A catalog was published in conjunction with this project.
Excerpt from the exhibition catalog of the Gerhard Marcks House by Director Arie Hartog:
“The true distinction of In the Swarm lies in the simultaneity and overlap of its media. Conceptually, there is a ‘simultaneity of the unconnected’ in the sense described by John Cage. Highly non-representational music and explicitly representational visual art combined create an atmospheric experience—indeed, not just an image—that emerges during the viewer’s time within the space and is dominated by what is depicted. Through the video sequence and the alternation between footage of flying creatures and intense white light, visual attention shifted from the moving motifs to the images on paper, to the projections of light and shadow on the walls, and back again. The assamblage (three projectors, twelve paper works, and a six-channel audio track) generated a complexity that can no longer be analytically processed through experience alone. Within the installation, analog, digitally representational, and machine-made stimuli alternately moved into the foreground. In the Swarm functions both as a sensory work with a carefully constructed atmosphere and as a lesson in how different media can operate together as a unified whole. Above all, the exhibition demonstrated that while complexity may overwhelm people on a rational level, it does not prevent them from engaging in a sensory experience of art.”
The video technology and editing were supported and realized by Jens Werner.
Photos: Sandra Beckefeldt
