Solo exhibition at the Pulverturm Oldenburg, Schloßwall

Opening hours: Fr 14-18h, Sa and Su 11 a.m. - 6 p.m. (on Saturday, 10. September, the Night of the Museums, from 11 a.m. - midnight)

544/544 (up/down) by Thomas Mohr is a fascinating visualization of the organ music written by the Hamburg-based conceptual artist and composer Hanne Darboven (1941–2009).

In Mohr’s work, Darboven’s suggestive but mathematically exacting music, which is based on the translation of numbers into tones, is likewise transferred mathematically and conceptually to the architecture of the St. Petri Church in Hamburg, where Darboven’s music was recorded.

The video is based on 1,528 digital photographs, of which 544 represent each of the church’s steps up to the spire, and 544 each step down again. In the montage the images are animated to the music: one initially sees 4 images alongside one another, and then 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 144 right up to a seemingly infinite reproduction of images in images. One sees a staccato-like animation of the photographs in each one of the progressively smaller individual images. All together they produce a complex interpretation of music and architecture that is as overwhelming visually as it is acoustically.

Thomas Mohr, 544/544 (up/down), The Netherlands 2011, One-Channel-Videoinstallation
Music: Hanne Darboven, Requiem Opus 22 Book 56. Organ: Thomas Dahl

Pulverturm Oldenburg

Thomas Mohr was born in 1954 in Mainz and currently lives and works in Amsterdam. Since the late 1980s, Mohr has been working on video works and installations in which he researches the processes of the image generation, and the transformation from perception to experience. His artworks can be situated at the intersection between common media and software; they refer both to conceptual and abstract tendencies in modern art and to automated, computer-generated processes. But most of all: his compositions are the result physical procedures of persitent excecuted craftmenship. Mohr's works are always reminding of the fact that every movie, video or animation is based on single images.