Between: The Secret of Futility

with Bruce Gilbert, AJ Pain, Vera, Nikhil Vettukattil, Stanislav Iordanov, Moritz Nebenführ
and a screening program

November 18, 2022, 6pm
– November 19, 2022, 6pm

Between is a series departing from music-based practices, which takes place between exhibitions in the Kunstverein’s gallery spaces for the duration of 24 hours. Its fourth edition is programmed by Stanislav Iordanov and Moritz Nebenführ and focuses on the artist and musician Bruce Gilbert.

Aside from his regular gig as guitar operator and lyricist in the English art school band Wire, which he co-founded in the mid 1970s and ultimately resigned from in 2004, Bruce Gilbert has been making noise and sculpting sound as a member of a number of other (non-)groups and projects such as Dome, Cupol, MZUI, P’o, Duet Emmo, A.C. Marias, and IBM. His equally numerous solo releases, meanwhile, are the curved crystal of genre-defining/defying electronic music. After a veiled appearance during a Wire concert, whose shows occasionally borrowed from the vaudevillian antics of Dada, Gilbert was given the nickname Beekeeper, which he soon adopted as his DJ alias. As The Beekeeper he was resident at britpop incubator nightclub Disobey in the mid 1990s, where he played blacked-out optical media in a garden shed suspended above the dancefloor. While many musicians follow a certain trajectory after the first few records, Gilbert’s recent releases and live sets continue to open up new terrain. On Friday evening, he will join us at the Kunstverein for a very special performance of a new piece titled The Secret of Futility, which lends its name to the event. Live support will come from Vera and AJ Pain as well as Moritz Nebenführ as DJ and compère.

The supporting acts are united by their formative encounters with Bruce Gilbert’s music. Vera (Karlsson) are a visual artist and musician making ‘abruptions’ on the London-Berlin continuum, via Frankfurt. They have played everywhere along the way, sometimes as Vanessa Cognizance, Hunterc44t (with Still House Plants’ Finlay Clark), or Dana Rosa. They are also a regular contributor to recent intercontinental club night of note, The Ladies Club. AJ Pain is a waste disposal company in southeast London as well as the music alias of Stanislav Iordanov. His album U-Heads issued on the label A Colder Consciousness in 2019. He has historical affinities with Hype Williams, Bo Khat Eternal Troof Family Band, and John T. Gast. In the last couple of years, Iordanov has turned up in Munich a few times, sometimes on stage as a dog at Kammerspiele, sometimes at the club as DJ 120BPM Days of Sodom, sometimes on Radio 80000. At the moment AJ Pain sounds like lava or plasma. Moritz Nebenführ works as a researcher, exhibition and performance maker across the fields of art, academia, and theater. He collaborates with the director Lennart Boyd Schürmann as BRUCH and has upcoming projects and residencies at venues such as Fleetstreet Theater (Hamburg, 2022), 8. Salon (Hamburg, 2023), Theater Neumarkt (Zurich, 2023), and Nida Art Colony (Lithuania, 2023).

Much of the material on Gilbert’s early solo albums originated as scores for ballet, contemporary dance, and film, beginning with his Work For “Do You Me? I Did” (1984), a commission for a piece of the same name by choreographer and frequent collaborator Michael Clark. After Friday’s performances, the gallery space will transform into a cinema for overnight viewing of a selection of Gilbert’s musical works for dance and film, with screenings by many of his collaborators and fellow travelers. On Saturday afternoon, he will join us again for an artist talk, and at dusk will begin a new work by Nikhil Vettukattil, Timepiece (2022), scored by Iordanov and performed by Jana Baldovino, Rosa Luckow, and Lennart Boyd Schürmann. Vettukattil is an artist and writer based in Oslo. Using a range of media such as sound, installation, performance, text, sculpture, and video, his practice questions modes of representation and image-making processes in their relation to lived experience and historical context. His new piece is a durational action for three or more performers, quadraphonic sound, light, and time. Bringing the 24-hour event to a close, it engages with the coincidence and negotiation of times: between the time of labor and the time of clocks, relativity of space time, times observed, and times lost.

The entrance fee is 5 EUR (reduced) and 7 EUR (regular), and grants access for 24 hours. Tickets can be purchased onsite at the door.

Timetable

Friday, November 18

6–8pm

Doors Open (Mix and Videos)

8–9pm

AJ Pain (Concert)

9–10pm

Bruce Gilbert – The Secret of Futility (Concert)

10–11pm

Vera (Concert)

11pm–12am

Moritz Nebenführ (DJ Set)

Saturday, November 19

12am–12pm

Screening program
with Michael Clark, Angela Conway, Chris Petit & Iain Sinclair, Martyn Pick, Brothers Quay, Wire

12–3pm

BRUCH Listening Session

3–4pm

Artist talk with Bruce Gilbert
and Stanislav Iordanov & Moritz Nebenführ

4.22.22pm

Nikhil Vettukattil – Timepiece (66 min)
sound by Stanislav Iordanov
performed by Jana Baldovino, Rosa Luckow, Lennart Boyd Schürmann

From 9pm

DJ Sets by 120BPM Days of Sodom, Vera, 0hne, Moritz Nebenführ
Favorit Bar, Damenstiftstraße 12, 80331 Munich