Art can be like dragging a ship over a hill. Obsessive. Pretty nuts. And futile, perhaps. Filmmaker Werner Herzog took this in a quite literal sense. For Fitzcarraldo, he had his crew excel in the task of schlepping a steamboat through the Amazon forest. A proof of metaphor, so to speak. The ultimate effort to gain nil—except to show how much potential there is in something devoid of a ‘function’ or ‘purpose’.
JESSICA EKOMANE is very much inspired by this approach to creation. She works with the elements. She breaks new ground by challenging conventional notions and questioning meaning. Known for compositions and performances that are as strong conceptually as they are appealing to the senses, EKOMANE is equally at home in the world of advanced digital sound as she is in contemporary music. She’s just released the album Manifolds, with a composition created specifically for the Acousmonium, a loudspeaker orchestra invented by the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris in the 1970s. For MaerzMusik 2024, she curated a series of events in public space that explored questions of perception and expectation, the diffusion and accessibility of sound. EKOMANE works with phenomena of spatiality and psycho-acoustics, with social routines and rituals. This approach, transposed to the practice of DJing, leads to the most intriguing results, as can be experienced at her long-awaited performance at Kookoo.
On the same evening, visual artist BARBARA BERNARDI presents a new work. She collects images, moments, and observations, that serve as the raw material and inspiration for poetic installations. The seemingly mundane is transformed into atmospheres that challenge the boundaries of perception. In BERNARDI’s work, shapes, light, colours, and contrasts converge in a language of the ethereal and elusive, always aware that art is only an attempt to frame the impossible.
In her flyer artwork, also on display at Ohm, CARLY FISCHER envisions a state of precarious equilibrium. Everything could be on the verge of collapse. Yet, as in many of YUKIHIRO TAGUCHI’s works, there is a certain balance to it, created by tension. Kookoo hosts MIEKO SUZUKI and ARA reinforce this potential for collapse, joining in the schlepping to conquer the useless.
Kookoo feat. Jessica Ekomane
Friday, 3.5.2024
Ohm Berlin | Köpenicker Straße 70 | 10179 Berlin
www.jessicaekomane.com | Event @ Facebook
