Hula Loops - Press Release
exhibition view, room 1
Opening: September 17, 2004. 7pm - 10pm
Duration: September 18 - October 23, 2004
Sinisa Kandić was born in Zagreb in 1967 and grew up in Switzerland. He studied at the academy in Belgrade in the class of Marija Dragojlovic from 1989 to 1991, and in the Düsseldorf academy in the class of Christian Megert from 1991 to 1997. 1996 master student of Megert. Kandić, lives and works in Düsseldorf.
The title of Sinisa Kandić’s new show reminds of the Hawaiian
Hula-Hoop game at first, that has been popular in the USA and Western
Europe in the 1950s. In fact it ist he title of a song of the British
Electro Band RAC. The expression part "Loop" refers to a typical
compository element of electronic Club music, the musical loop, which
repeats sounds rhythmically as part of musical layering and structure
– a method also used in visual digital composition software.
Sinisa Kandić employed those compository principals for his glass
works and transferred them into images, sampling specific websites of
the record label WARP, the very company that published RAC recordings
from which Kandić deduced the exhibition title. The referral to music
also corresponds with Kandić’s earlier works: lines of color
on, or rather behind glass, partly in a more graphic style, partly in
a more painterly fashion. But while this relation to music was of a more
synaesthetic kind, now the title on the image explicitly refers to the
music. The concept of design is engaged by assuming motives from the WARP
homepage, which hypertextual structure can also be found in Kandić’s
work in the linkage of individual images. Beyond prominent relations between
graphic design and art known since the times of Dada, the terms links
back to the Italian Renaissance where "Disegno" was an integral
part of the theoretical side of the arts. Within this realm Design means
more than just the conceptual design of a piece, but rather implicates
an anticipated potential reality. The works of Sinisa Kandićs partially
live in a realm of the potential as well. The dynamics of his works of
art, which in the end are always deprived of consummating a view, lies
in reflecting the exterior on the panes of glass. This reflection not
only creates space, it also displays the viewer. Sinisa Kandić makes
this aspect visible by placing the first to protagonists of this reflection
next to the graphical elements of the WARP homepage: the studio space
and himself. Here he employs photography that digitally dissolves the
monochromatic contrast of the image and reappears simplified as a sandblasted
form on the glass panes. Within this relation to the space lies a principal
parallel to the recording: First, the surround sound of the recording
and secondly the acoustics of the space in which the recording is played.
Both is superimposed in the actual experience. With this dynamic abeyance
of the image, Kandić allures axiomatically to a change in paradigm
concerning the key metaphor for what an image actually is. It ceased to
be the window of the renaissance opening up to a fixed perspectivly constructed
space, but it rather is a Braun tube whose cathode ray bring images within
time to light, while the screen reflects and illuminates the viewer from
a specific angle.
Thomas W. Kuhn M.A.
