11 November–18 December 2005
Opening Friday 11 November 7-9pm
In November and December Signal is pleased to present an exhibition with the Stockholm-based artist Henrik Andersson. During this period there will be a number of evening events in parallel with the exhibition. Signal’s exhibition programme has been planned in conjunction with Full Pull 05 – electronics across the field, a festival of electronic activities in music and art.
Language, music and sound are recurrent materials in HenrikAndersson’s practice, as is his constant preoccupation with exposing and illuminating hidden power structures.
In Marx Bass (2005), Henrik Andersson has rebuilt a bass guitar so that its scale of notes is based on Karl Marx’s theory of capital accumulation. The classical, Western, musical scale uses a 1:2 relationship but the bands on the rebuilt guitar have been positioned so that an 11:4 scale is achieved, representing the formula for capital accumulation put forward in Das Kapital. It is the rise and fall of capitalism that can thus be heard projected by the loudspeakers.
If it’s not love then it’s the bomb that will bring us together (2005), consists of a sound installation and a C-print. A seismograph recording, made in Canada during the most recent nuclear-weapon test (no. 2058) in Pakistan in 1998, has been converted into audible sound that is reproduced in the gallery. The low-frequency vibrations set up by the enormous energy released during a nuclear explosion are impossible to hide.
In the third work, SMS (2005), Henrik Andersson sent the Swedish Liberal Party’s (Folkpartiet) policy document on immigration and integration as an SMS to Germany where it was read aloud by a synthesized voice using a programme that can recognize German and English. The policy document, which includes a proposal for language tests and a requirement for fluency in Swedish as a prerequisite for Swedish nationality, becomes so distorted as to be almost unintelligible. The power structures and hierarchical systems innate in language become all the more evident.
