Bernhard Schreiner
25.09.2025 - 01.11.2025
Mosaic Evolution
Kai Middendorff Gallery
There is always enough light to see the darkness. A perfect darkness would not be one.
(Marcus Steinweg, 2025)
Darkness and sound have a lot in common: they envelop us, they are everywhere and nothing at the same time, they are not tangible, not material. I feel drawn to both darkness and sound. (In neither can you disappear completely and you are not completely lost). Now I would also like to wrest something from the material, the world of things, that can be like darkness, like sound.
Mosaic Evolution brings together works, processes and sounds from different times to form an installation. As the press release for the exhibition Patch Sprawl (FOX, Vienna, 2024) put it: A convolute held together by the gravity of interest. Sprawls of material, matter and imagination from the last thirteen years. In addition to new, older and transformed works, a new version of the table installation The difference between things in time and time in things (NIZZA, Berlin, 2024) can also be seen, as well as collaborative works with the artist and musician LeRoy Stevens, Los Angeles (further development of the central theme from The closer you look, the better we look, EL-Project, Berlin, 2023).
Mosaic Evolution
(or modular evolution) is the concept that evolutionary change takes place in some parts orsystems - without simultaneous changes in other parts. Another definition is the "evolution of characters at various rates both within and between artworks".I get to keep what nobody needs. I feel like I've always done that, picking up broken glasses, broken plates too! -Not necessarily to repair them in the conventional, Western sense, as exact reproductions. But the whole paragraph goes like this:
Nothing is ever alike. The best thing is the difference. I get to keep what nobody needs. Diane Arbus wrote this in 1971 - it's great!
What do you need? Almost nothing? The less, the better? On the contrary: because nothing ever remains the same and because difference is the best thing, many things are needed: collected, changed, forgotten, lost, rediscovered, archived, new, old, never shown, already shown ... - in order to constantly create new conditions and to show again (even to those who are in favor of the practical) what supposedly nobody needs! That the mosaic-like "evolution" of a work, as well as that between individual works, takes place, that in a strange way it hardly seems to be subject to linear time progressions or that these are less interesting (John Latham's "Time-Base Theory" comes to mind), can possibly be understood in this exhibition. "Events" are hidden behind or in the exhibited objects. Something, certainly quite a lot, has happened to them (with them). Of course, we are also transforming them and ourselves in this moment, just as we can also create an idea of their and our own future constitution. Should we only deal with objects because they report on events?
If certain plant seeds remain germinable for a thousand years and glass has no melting point because it continuously becomes softer, more liquid or more solid (under the influence of temperature) - does it then perhaps make sense to devote our attention not primarily to objects (or the smallest particles in the universe), but to processes and events? What we cannot see and cannot grasp (but can experience and perhaps sense): Temporality, process, repetition, immaterial things - do they paradoxically make the world more "graspable" than the world of things is able to do? Sound, for example, which is changeable and fades, as can be heard in the table installation The difference between things in time and time in things as a generative four-channel live composition, would be such an accumulation of processes that are intangible, that never become visible. This modular synthesizer patch, which takes minimal fluctuations in the measured resistance in the induced electrical field of plants or fungi as its starting point, is to a certain extent predictable and at the same time not, a threshold, a world of the in-between opens up, between constructed present, blurred memory and (im)possible future. This gives rise to a further association: the magnetism of knowing and not knowing. LeRoy Stevens said this about the tangible/controllable and (at the same time) intangible, chance-driven, difficult to control processes in my acoustic works, especially in concert live sets. This magnetism, this force that is also not anchored in the objective, is present in all the works I have assembled: Control and chance, precision and letting go, ability and inability, knowledge and ignorance ...
Is it also possible for objects (with sound it seems clear: This possibility - that sound is nothing - is characteristic of sound, perplexing, disturbing, yet dangerously seductive, David Toop, 2010) to at least sometimes put us in a position to follow "ghosts"? To leave the world of objects and objects, to swim in reality as if in a sound soup, without a firm foothold? Or are we ourselves the ghosts? A cluster of singularities. A cloud of uncontrollable probabilities. A breathing nothingness that cannot be justified by anything. - ? (Markus Steinweg, 2025)
In this exhibition, we are among ourselves, whatever we may be! Questions (to ourselves, to art) do not necessarily have to be answered here. We look at events (and their assertions of form frozen into objects), we listen to them, we breathe - after all!
It's what I've never seen before that I recognize. (Diane Arbus, April 1, 1971)
Vernissage: September 25, 7-9 p.m.
Kai Middendorff Gallery
Niddastaße 84 Hall
60329 Frankfurt
T. +49 (0) 69 743 090 35