Afterparty at 22:00
ABOUT EXHIBITION:
For its first exhibition, panke.gallery is putting two Berlin-based artists in dialogue with one another. Daniel Keller and Daniel Pflumm both developed their own formal languages out of connections with club culture, either directly or through its extended environment, thus creating work that in both cases is exemplary for its generational milieu.
The two artists are linked through their engagement with corporate aesthetics, the world of advertising, prosumers and their brands, icons, and symbols. They deconstruct the aesthetics of multinational corporations, which dominate, even devour, the fields of communication and creativity in their ever-expanding appropriation of the world. Their artistic concern with the futuristic techno-utopias of capitalism does not, however, lead them to visions of a cypherpunk dystopia, but rather uses the ambivalent, sometimes ironic mode of Pop as a mode of resistance. As squats turned into clubs, clubs into labs, labs into startups and startups into AirSpace, both artists not only accompanied these developments and critically commented on them but also staged interventions within this changing context through their work. In the exhibition their practices are represented by a concentrated selection of works that are exemplary in their reflection on the intersections of club culture, music, art, commodification and branding.
This inaugural exhibition also speaks to panke.gallery’s focus on the intertwined histories of digital or netbased art activities and their relation to sonic/sound/poetry and club culture.
ARTISTS
Daniel Keller (b. 1986), was born in Detroit and lives and works in Berlin. Daniel Keller’s work exists at the intersection of technology, economics, culture, and collaboration—by absorbing forms found in nature for mixed media works, he illuminates “the tension between urban planning and an organic spatial landscape.” Integrating elements as disparate as concrete, wood, and resin with web-related works, he evokes the disparity between physical and digital space. The artist often opposes innately human instincts, such as the nomadic impulse found in backpacking or a bent toward symmetry, with environmental phenomenon like organic growth and symbiotic relationships. Keller critically addresses notions of industrial progress and the ways in which a “prosumer imagineer artist” might be both a technological disruption and reaction. Keller founded AIDS-3D, an artistic collaboration with Nik Kosmas, which further explores the potential of “techno-utopianism.” (Artspace)
Daniel Pflumm born 1968 in Geneva, Switzerland lives and works in Berlin. Pflumm became known through his light-boxes which dissected the logos of brand names, and through his videoloops which reduced the dramaturgy of TV commercials to their essentials. He founded a company which was listed under various names but did not produce anything but self-represenations by logos and symbols. Pflumm strips media art of its last residues of fragmentary statements and transforms it into something that can be placed within the art as well as the club context. (medienkunstnetz)