Carsten Nicolai
I participated in the opening day of the Carsten Nicolai’s exhibition in K21 Düsseldorf on September 27th 2019. It was an interesting experience that I decided to report about it here.
With some 40 multimedia works, the exhibition provides an overview of the work of the artist and musician Carsten Nicolai who has been working at the interface of visual art, music and science since the early 1990s. Using electronic sound and light material. Carsten Nicolai creates minimalist installations, sound performances and visualizations of physical phenomena that reflect systems and structures of the media world. As a musician, Nicolai is one of the best known representatives of contemporary electronic music under the pseudonym Alva Noto. Since his participation in documenta X (1997) and the Venice Biennials in 2001 and 2003, he has also been exhibited worldwide as a visual artist.
In K21, he organizes the spacious space in the basement as an open set for the presentation of his works which are often based on interaction. The title of the exhibition “Parallax Symmetry” alludes to the physical phenomenon of parallax (from ancient Greek parállaxis, “change, moving back and forth”) which describes the apparent change in the position of an object when the point of view of observation shifts. The symmetry of the exhibition is derived from the polarity of black and white as well as light and dark processed in different ways. Light and darkness, noise and silence, visibility and invisibility are pairs of opposites that Nicolai uses productively in his artistic practice. The soberly elegant aesthetics of the objects and installations often conceal a complex functional context that refers to technical and physical experimental arrangements and often also to historical aspects of scientific research.
Carsten Nicolai, born 1965 in Karl-Marx-Stadt (new Chemnitz), lives and works in Berlin.
For more photos please visit the Instagram page of Eventbody!
Excerpt taken and translated from K21
By Niki Nazemi