Opening: Saturday 16 August 2014, 6pm
The visitor enters a space demarcated by bright red floor-to-wall carpeting. Discreet exits in the walls allow access to the rest of the building, which remains, for the most part, empty. Crossing the carpeted threshold down to the ensuing rooms – including the main exhibition spaces of the Kunsthalle as well as the institution’s lower level – one finds oneself in the twilight zone.
Loudspeakers scattered throughout the building emit a drone composition – synthesized hums that stand on the edge of awareness, moved to an audible range. Inside the red room the volume shifts, allowing the sustained sound from beyond to leak in through the apertures. In the back rooms and the lower level, the sound rever-berates from one bare wall to another, and the structure of the red room becomes fully apparent, as if one had stepped behind a set.
While Delay Dust creates a fully immersive sensory environment, the lo-fi objectness of its constituting elements simultaneously gives the viewer the feeling of having stepped into a scale model of the very exhibition he or she is visiting. This passage from one state of experience to the next is both physical and conceptual, and depends on whether one considers the exhibition as an aggregate of distinct objects (the drone, Gallery Bells, the red carpet, a contribution by Georgia Sagri, etc.), as a stage for a private sci-fi narrative, or as an abstract display architecture for an exhibition. The exhibition is the medium; the medium becomes a form; the form follows the contours of the memory of past radical gestures.
Emanuel Rossetti was born in 1987. He lives and works in Basel. Previous exhibitions include Brightest Day/ Darkest Night, Burning Bridges, New York; Drip Event, The Power Station, Dallas; Life & the Invitation& Vapour in Debri&, The Modern Institute, Glasgow; HAGGARD CARAVAN, The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield.
Kunsthalle Bern and the artist would like to thank Lutz Eitel, Marco Papiro, Georgia Sagri, Yael Salomonowitz, Serigraphie Uldry, Anina Troesch, Jan Vorisek, Charles Wolfe, Dan Solbach and Michi Zaugg.
Delay Dust has been made possible thanks to the generous support of Kultur Stadt Bern, Burgergemeinde Bern and George Foundation, Winterthur.
Events
A conversation with Emanuel Rossetti
Sunday, 17 August 2014, 2.00 pm
150 WÖLFLI
Music & Text on Adolf Wölfli
29–30 August 2014
Friday 29 August
12-hour reading from 6.00 pm until at least 6.00 am
Adolf Wölfli: From the Cradle to the Grave
3,000 pages read non-stop by you and various personalities, all through the night.
Free admission.
Saturday 30 August
4.00 pm
‘A Coconut with a Zipper’ – a performance for children aged 7–10 with Balts Nill and Lorenz Pauli
18:00
5x Music and Text on Adolf Wölfli
Kjell Keller, Wölfli Meets Joyce In this performance, texts from Wölfli’s Von der Wiege bis zum Graab are juxtaposed with quotations from Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Freely interpreted fragments from Wölfli’s music, as well as Irish and Swiss folk music, provide moments of contrast.
Winners of the 150 Wölfli Composition Competition
Christoph Blum, Lieder vom Riesen-Theat’r-Diräktoh, for alto and pan flute
Sara Wüest, Blas d’r doch ins Füdla, for solo soprano, paper trumpet, flute, clarinet, accordion
Benjamin Ryser, Wölfli’s Music. Improvisation concept for a performance without an audience, for 6 to 10 performers, video
Wölfli Allgebrah. Eric Förster (bass-baritone) and Danny Exnar (piano) After more than 90 years, the original Wölfli compositions will be heard again for the first time since they were written. Those composed in solmisation syllables have been transcribed in accordance with the current state of research.
8.00 pm
Bern is Everywhere Allgebrah. A tribute to Adolf Wölfli with Gerhard Meister, Antoine Jaccoud, Michael Stauffer, Ariane von Graffenried, Michael Pfeuti and Adi Blum
10.00 pm
Fred Frith Legendary guitarist and composer. Rhythms and sounds rarely heard by the ear.
Tickets available at: tickets@150woelfli.ch
Subject to change
http://150woelfli.ch/index.php/project/knkdafjvoekoexykbsfaeljg/
