Dan Walwin
Preprogrammes
17 Sept–30 Oct 2022

The video works of Dan Walwin (lives and works in Amsterdam) operate within a drifting mode – scenery and movement possess a hypnotic presence, yet at the same time appear dissociatively disconnected. The mediums of sound, text and sculpture are important components in the spatial presentation of his videos. Walwin experiments with the means of filmic staging and its affective potentials. Instead of merging into a narrative, individual elements stand side by side and seem to follow their own logic. Paradoxical connections, disturbances and deviations give the impression of an audiovisual system whose inner mechanics are faltering.

For the exhibition Preprogrammes, Walwin has produced a new video drawn from disparate sources, including a misreading of Benjamin Britten’s music drama Curlew River (1964), which in turn combines an adaptation of a Japanese Noh theatre play with elements of a medieval mystery play. The video script interweaves, among other things, anecdotal memories from 2019 and transposed narratives from the book Deep Deception (2022), which contains testimonies from five women who were spied on by British undercover police officers. These accounts become a pool of collective dreaming, shimmering between report and myth, between nostalgic and alien.

Preprogrammes is Walwin’s first solo exhibition in Germany.

Exhibition handout

The exhibition is supported by