HYPER! A Journey into Art and Music

Sound, Vision, Film and a Destroyed Piano! What happens when musicians take their cue from ideas and strategies drawn from the art world? And what kind of pictures emerge when painters allow themselves to be influenced by music? Taking an interest in the lives of others, pursuing the unknown, copying it, deploying and using it in one’s own work – in short, engaging in a cross-mapping between the worlds of music and the visual arts: this is the subject of the exhibition and the catalogue HYPER! A JOURNEY INTO ART AND MUSIC, curated by Max Dax, former editor-in-chief of Spex and Electronic Beats. The book brings together classics such as Peter Saville’s groundbreaking record sleeve for the New Order masterpiece “Power, Corruption and Lies” from 1983, Emil Schult’s narrative-minimalist pictures that provided the model for Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” cover of 1974, and Cyprien Gaillard’s celebrated 3D installation “Night Life” of 2015. The influence of Richard Wagner on the work of the action artist Christoph Schlingensief, who died in 2010, is examined, as is the minute-long opera composed especially for the occasion by Alexander Kluge. The reciprocal influences between music and art are illuminated through the examples of Albert Oehlen and Scooter, of Thomas Scheibitz and the Melvins and of Daniel Blumberg, as well as through photographic and video works by Andrea Stappert, Sven Marquardt and Andreas Gursky; works by The KLF, Mark Leckey and Bettina Pousttchi extend the approach into the documentary. In narrative terms the book is held together by a wealth of background interviews that Max Dax has conducted with the protagonists of HYPER! over the past 30 years. Accompanying the exhibition HYPER! at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, music presentations by Rosemarie Trockel and Thea Djordjadze, by Hans Ulrich Obrist and by Albert Oehlen, among others, will take place at the Elbphilharmonie as part of the “Internationales Musikfestival Hamburg” (27 April–29 May 2019). In all, more than 40 international artists and musicians are taking part in this programme on the borderline between art and music.

Interviewees:
Kim Gordon, Alexander Kluge, Mark Leckey, Sven Marquardt, Michaela Melián, Olaf Nicolai, Albert Oehlen, Bettina Pousttchi, Daniel Richter, Peter Saville, Thomas Scheibitz, Bettina Scholz, Andrea Stappert, Britta Thie and many others

Exhibition:
Deichtorhallen Hamburg, 1/3 – 11/8/2019