The turbo wave of the 80’s left its mark on the industry and on the whole cultural situation in Western Europe. The sound effect gives sensation of real physical power. This music genre, which originated in the Balkans, and its impact are the inspiration for the work of Serbian artist Baptiste Debombourg. The music becomes a conceptual model of behaviour and is translated into wall deformed by the power of a musical wave. This installation is melted with the architecture of the surrounding space and so becomes part of it.

Photos: Baptiste Debombourg | Patricia Dorfmann Gallery Paris | Galerie HO Marseilles | Galerija10m2 Sarajevo

The work of the Belgian visual artist Ana Torfs consists of various installations with slide projections, photo series, a web project, a feature film and several publications. Torfs has dealt, among others, with questions such as perception, representation and the construction of images and identity. She has also focused on the tension between text and image, between reading and visualising and – in a larger sense – between the fabricated and the real. Above all her work creates a strong visual experience.

With five large-format slide projections, several photo series, and a song project for the Internet, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein- Westfalen K21 presents the first museum-based overview of the work of Ana Torfs. Representation and visualisation, reality and fiction form the cornerstones of Ana Torfs’ installations which consist of projected images (usually black and white slides) and texts. In precisely choreographed audiovisual constellations Torfs brings to life literary, historical and political material.

In these projects the artist works with actors who embody their roles in a demonstratively matter-of-fact and functional way. Documents on Joan d’Arc, a famous one act play by the symbolist poet Maurice Maeterlinck but also testimonies from Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht’s murder trial serve as starting points for room-filling installations such as “Du mentir-faux” (About Lying Falsehood), 2000, “The Intruder”, 2004, or “Anatomy”, 2006. Ana Torfs has been practising and developing her method of subtly dissecting and superimposing places, people, voices and atmospheres for over fifteen years. In doing so, she draws from the repertoire of dramatic, photographic and cinematic techniques.

Apart from a selection of earlier works, the recently completed slide installation “Displacement” (2009) will be shown for the first time at K21.

In the below video by Ralph Goertz from the Institut für Kunstdokumentation und Szenografie, Torfs introduces the work on her exhibition at K21.

The Exhibition called Album/Tracks A at the K21, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf will run until the 18Th of July, 2010.

Photos Ana Torfs | K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen | Video by Ralph Goertz, Institut für Kunstdokumentation und Szenografie

In his conceptual installations and sculptures Michael Johansson puts the qualities from daily life objects in opposition to their field of application. By repetition, displacement of scale, and new function, he questions the receivers interpretations of the unique. The objects are frozen in their new shape - while the function is displayed, the functionality is taken away.

Michael Johansson about his work: “I am fascinated by flea markets. Walking around to find doubles of seemingly unique, though often useless, objects I have already purchased at another flea market, is not only an inquisitive activity for me but part of my working process. Despite the fact that I did not have any use for most of these objects in the first place, the unlikeliness of discovering them twice in two different places makes the desire for their possession irresistible. The unique and the unknown origin of the object increases my wish to own its double. The rules compelling me in selecting things at flea markets are also central to my art practice. Engaging directly with these objects, manipulating them, juxtaposing them against each other or representing them in a new context is my method of work. Through out my different explorations of the potentials of my collection of found and acquired things, one has been to free objects from their function. By forcing these objects into contexts in which their functional qualities are put into opposition with their field of application, the objects are stripped of their meaning for existence. In a series of work I have assembled objects connected to a certain place, for example a kitchen or a living room, into a cubic geometrical unit. The collected items, originally gathered from hundreds of different homes, are precisely stacked into the empty spaces of other larger items, a process that repeats itself until all the objects are carefully packed into one single tight sculptural form. This transformation addresses questions about history, life and space. The sculptures hold stories of compressed worlds from a time gone by, and the function has been forced to give in for the notions of color and shape.”

Photos Michael Johansson | Conceptual art and installations

Zoom:  W&V Collection Spring/Summer 2010.

Style: Melted top: T 10-64-01,

Style: Folded seam skirt: S 10-63-10

WARMENHOVEN & VENDERBOS | Collection S/S  10

“Weil ich es sage” (Because I say so) is an installation by the German artist Erika Hock. The title of the work reminds one of the conceptual writing piece by Robert Rauschenberg ( This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so). But ,looking at the other works and their titles in the series (how to love a bomb, gebeugt, es musste sein), Hock links more to the fact that she is challenging the resistance of a “strong, seemingly unmovable obstacle or barrier”,physical as well as mental. She increases the pressure with a belt on a “virtual” solid wall or block to a point where it  bends and breaks, she drops a large solid cube so it damages by the impact but also under its own weight. The rigidness object reveals its weakness, its smooth skin cracks, it’s authority flows away and it becomes fragile. The clean and sharp geometry gets affected, distorted and damaged. Forged by pressure, a concept which also can be seen in and linked to the Imploded Sculptures by Ewerdt Hilgemann. In these sculptures Hilgemann used also external pressure, in his case created by a vacuum inside the object, to reshape large stainless steel geometric bodies.  But where Hilgemann uses these real rigid materials for his objects, Hock basically creates the illusion of a rigid objects by using wood, gypsum cardboard, latex foam and adhesive polishing plaster. This fact adds yet another layer to the conceptual content and meaning of her works.

Hock has made a strong statement with this series of interesting conceptual pieces.

Photos: Erika Hock | Conceptual Installations