The Fondazione Giuliani per l’arte contemporanea presents HELLO an exhibition by Simon Dybbroe Møller on view 11 October 2011–28 January 2012.
The Fondazione Giuliani per l’arte contemporanea is pleased to present Simon Dybbroe Møller’s first solo presentation in Rome, with a series of new works entirely produced in occasion of the show.
Hello,
has a certain non-word-ness about it. It feels more like sound and less like communication of meaning than most words. When Thomas Edison discovered the principle of recorded sound, the first word he yelled into the machine was ‘halloo’. Hello is the title of the audio piece that, with a stressed correctness of tone and attempted neutrality, will speak to you when you enter the Fondazione Giuliani. Hello is also the title of this exhibition.
I often suffer from sudden dizziness when thinking that perhaps things gather in clusters by themselves.
—Pablo Henrik Llambias
It will be like this: when you stand or walk on O and No, a gym floor that has been assembled with a different intention than the ruliness of sports, you will see that the floor has been reduced to an image. An image of material excess. Or an image of nothing. An image of that which turns hell into hello. On the walls you will see O: in these inkjet prints, the same subject is reproduced over and over again, only in different colours and styles. They have their origin in Word, a program released in 1983 by Microsoft. In this program, one is offered a selected range of colours and sizes to produce and output letters and numbers. One is likewise offered the option to then cancel these choices. These O’s are unfinished. They have never gone full circle to become holes in language. They simply smile back at us. If O is a thing, it is a thing that signifies nothing.
Things Thinking Things consists of bundles of photographed objects chosen according to the simplest of all phonetic principles, that profane poetic tool: the rhyme. Here, the rhyme is a machine and it spits out objects. Each family of objects is arranged in stacks according to generation. And finally, Produce. Straight-from-the-package household-printers, hanging on the wall, sticking out their tongues. They have been unplugged in the midst of printing their very first piece of paper, and now they hang there, substituting the frame, which would otherwise have held the image. The new bike does not exist.
Hello is my second exhibition in Italy this autumn. The first, entitled O, opened in Milan some weeks ago. O, a sort of premature echo of Hello, oscillates between the too much and the less than little. The same could be said of Hello, but this show goes a step further. Hello takes on limitless expenditure and passive indifference as modes of resistance.
Yours truly,
Simon Dybbroe Møller
Berlin, September 2011
Simon Dybbroe Møller (b. 1976, Aarhus, Denmark) lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo shows include The Barbican Centre (upcoming 2012); O, Francesca Minini, Milan (2011); Rest On Your Belly In The Mud, Laura Bartlett Gallery, London (2011); Flotsam and Jetsam, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (with Jacob Dahl Jürgensen) (2011); Brain, UMMA Projects, University of Michigan, Museum of Art, Ann Arbor (2010); Fast Flickering Black Bugs on a Cool White Background, Galerie Kamm, Berlin (2010); Appendix, Frankfurter Kunstverein (2009); Kompendium, Kunstverein Hannover (2009). Selected group exhibitions include Dance Your Life, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2011); A Slowdown at the Museum, Extra City Kunsthal, Antwerp (2011); Momentum 2011 – 6th Nordic Biennial for Contemporary Art, Moss, Norway (2011).
Fondazione Giuliani per l’arte contemporanea
Via Gustavo Bianchi
1 – 00153 Rome Italy
www.fondazionegiuliani.org