Gedankenstrich(e)

Thomas Mohr / Germany, Netherlands / 2014 / International Premiere / 9 min.

synopsis

Consisting of multiple variations of interior and exterior views during a train trip, with the various images ordered into tidy grids evoking the ride, the film is primarily a journey through a landscape of text. It is based on Requiem, a composition by German conceptual artist Hanne Darboven, whose “mathematical music” creates sound from numbers that refer to important moments in cultural history, manually arranged into tables to create large-scale installations.

DETAIL:
The film is part of series dedicated to various parts of the Requiem, here opus 22, book 60, where “Gedankenstrich(e)” was an oft-repeated marginal note referring to painter Max Dauthendey’s book describing his travels around the world.

biography

German video artist Thomas Mohr (1954) lives in the Netherlands, where he studied 1985–1989 at the Rietveld Academie. In his internationally exhibited work, he tries to find new ways of generating images. He used to be interested in abstraction, then in digital photography. Since 1985, he has been putting together a photographic archive that today consists of some 300,000 items.