Hänzel & Gretzel – Hamlet Machine
(new soundtrack by Paradise Now)
3 video projectors form a ‘cathodic helmet’. Hänzel & Gretzel (Daniel Mangeon, 2000, FR) makes us read, see, and wait for their own interpretation of the Hamlet Machine, after the text by Heiner Müller. Through this descent into Hamlet’s mental universe, a virtual puppet with violent human pulses, Hänzel & Gretzel tries to unravel the mechanisms of the interpretation phenomenon.
This installation by Hänzel & Gretzel was considered as the start of a series of musical and other collaborations. The first version was shown in the project room of Argos (Brussels) during September-October 1998. The soundtrack was made by Dead Man Ray. Then other soundtracks were created by international artists (DJ Olive, Scanner,…) as live AV performances curated by Transcultures in various events/cities just after Daniel Mangeon passed away in 2000.
For this exhibition and new presentation of the installation at M KHA, Philippe Franck aka Paradise Now (main sound /text/concept collaborator of Hanzel & Gretzel in the 90s) composed a new cinematic soundtrack with fragments of Heiner Muller’s original text in German read by Petermfriess and Gabriele Wolf.
Hänzel & Gretzel
Daniel Mangeon (Nancy/Brussels/Paris -1966-2000) aka Hanzel & Gretzel, was a hybrid artist/videographer, de-constructor of mental images, AV meteor of the 90s who worked around the William S. Burroughs, Coil ( in the form of installations), Rimbaud, Philip K. Dick… with Current 93, Ira Cohen or even Gerard Malanga for his “audio-poetic press releases” (“Akashic peeper”) while making short incisive videos on civil fragmentation, genocides and world conflicts (“Blind words area” series). He worked closely with sound artist Paradise Now.
Lenine was a mushroom - Moving images in the 1990s
With wider accessibility of both video hardware and editing software, the 1990s were a key period for the development and proliferation of film and video art.
Titled after Sergey Kuryokhin and Sergey Sholokhov’s absurd 1991 mockumentary from the last days of the Soviet Union, the group exhibition Lenin Was a Mushroom –Moving Images in the 1990s will examine the 1990s — which we might define here as the period between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the ‘War on Terror’. It will look at moving images that offered reflections of the era but also new modes and means for image-making through the technological advancements adopted by artists.
Works by: AMVK, Aernout Mik, Amar Kanwar, Andrea Fraser, Artūras Raila, David Claerbout, Gianni Motti, Gillian Wearing, Hänzel & Gretzel, Johan Grimonprez, Nedko Solakov, Pipilotti Rist, Rosalind Nashashibi, Rosângela Rennó, Şener Özmen and Erkan Özgen, Sergey Kuryokhin and Sergey Sholokhov, Shilpa Gupta, Stan Douglas.
Curator: Nav Haq
Architectural design: Samyra Moumouh
A programme of live events will take place in June and July that will consider artistic practices of the 1990s and from June until August, a related cinema programme will be presented at De Cinema (Antwerp).
Informations
- 03.06 > 21.08.2022
- M HKA, Musée d’Art Contemporain d’Anvers
- Leuvenstraat 32, 2000 Antwerpen
- muhka.be
Production
- M HKA, The Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp
- Both exhibition and live events are part of ‘Our Many Europes‘, a project of the museum confederation ‘L’Internationale‘.
