Florian Hecker, Chisenhale Gallery, London

Florian Hecker
Chisenhale Gallery
64 Chisenhale Road, London, E3 5QZ
11.02.10 - 28.03.10
Preview Thursday 11 February 2010 6.30 – 8.30pm
Wednesday to Sunday 1 – 6pm
Thursday 4th March until 9pm

Musician and sound artist Florian Hecker presents a new installation at one of London's best established and most consistently interesting contemporary art spaces, East London's Chisenhale Gallery. The public gallery undertakes 5 shows each year, each an ambitious newly commissioned solo project by an emerging international artist.

Hecker's installation at Chisenhale comprises of 4 separate works, displayed in a sequence which guides the viewer (listener?) around a sparsely empty gallery space, ornamented with slick, black, ceiling-mounted speakers. The collection of works utilise immaculately produced electronic noises to lead us aurally and physically through a shifting landscape of auditory experiences; At turns disorienting, intriguing and captivating, the largely multi-channel works give us an awareness of the physical contingencies involved in the process of listening, and invite us to explore modes of interacting with what we hear.

The most visually striking work is an untitled new piece featuring a single speaker pointing concentrated bursts of sound at a ceramic-tiled section of the gallery wall. Beautifully lit, the speaker casts a symmetrical shadow across the minimal white-on-white of the tiles on the wall, while the sound oscillates and reflects back to the on-looking viewer.

The pieces are durational works that, through a variety of approaches - sounds generated through the audience's movements, exercises in three-channel panning that alternate between clockwise and anti-clockwise rotations and works spread between speakers placed a gallery's width apart - form a continuation of the artist's exploration of sound in relation to the body and space.

Hecker's list of collaborators includes Carsten Holler, Cerith Wyn Evans and Aphex Twin. This exhibition of 4 new sound installations is definitely not to be missed.

Read more here.