Hanne Darboven (1941-2009) was a minimal and conceptual artist, best known for her installations consisting large and systematically organized sheets of handwritten text or tables of numbers. Her work is founded on a complex system of calculations, often based upon times and dates. It chronicles existence and evokes the unavoidable linear nature of time.

As a child, Hanne Darboven showed remarkable musical talent. She put this aside in favour of the visual arts, but music kept playing a role in her work. The proximity between a musical variation and Darboven’s handwritten number sequences with variants is obvious. In 1980, the artist started to translate her numerical systems into sequences of music (number 0 = note D, etc), resulting in fascinating sound…: a mixture of ‘mathematical’ and traditional German classical music. Darboven’s Requiem is a good example of this; it was written for organ and became the largest musical work that Darboven completed.

Thomas Mohr is a media artist in whose work systems and processes also play a large role. He refers both to conceptual and abstract tendencies in modern art and to automated, computer-generated processes. In his recent work, he became fascinated by the increase of visual information by digital photography. He uses a personal photo archive containing more than 300,000 pictures taken since 1985, re-organizing them in series and patterns, synthesizing and filtering them and confronting them with conceptual and musical themes and compositions.

2² (zwei hoch zwei) / Hanne Darboven

Thomas Mohr has photographed nine publications by Hanne Darboven, dating from 1971 to 2006, at the Research Centre for Artists’ Publications in Weserburg, Bremen. The resulting series of photographs is processed and serialized as a visual response to a short excerpt from Darboven’s epic Requiem. Hundreds of photos of the interior pages of the artist books blend into each other in a rich variation of patterns and cycles. Read more...