Simon Dybbroe Møller
"Simon Dybbroe Møller" by Wojciech Olejnik, Winter 2007, pp. 96-97
In Simon Dybbroe Møller’s exhibition “On ill winds and loss of sanity, part II,” the interior of the gallery has been furnished with hand-painted fluorescent lights that together make up the work All Yesterday’s Parties. Some of the lights are affixed to the ceiling; others stand clustered in corners. Their illumination travels along the walls and through the gallery space, which comes to feel like a corridor, or an unravelling trail.
The abundance of light benefits some of the exhibition’s subtler pieces, such as DEAD BbAGGAGE (made in collaboration with Jacob Dahl Jürgensen). This piece is composed of two glass wind chimes. Each of the chimes’ tubes rings in a specific pitch, spelling out the title of the work. But one’s ear follows a louder, droning sound that intermittently resonates from the back of the gallery. Sound takes time to travel; so do events, one might add: so does an artwork. The source of the sound, a video entitled Pantomima della Stella Gigante, is a mimed recreation of a photograph of a group of technicians carrying a Frank Stella painting. Here the event is in suspended animation, yet occurs in time. Photography has the ability to freeze an event, prolong its intensity, make it last forever. Yet as the figures stand still holding nothing, all that is left is the pose, the strain, the form, stretched over time. If an event is an instant, not measurable by time—in a sense, a temporal rupture—then here it is the exact opposite: it is time itself, hanging undealt with like a chronic neurosis.
The video Improvised Szkieletor Soundtrack (Attempt #5) presents a projection of footage of an unfinished building in Krakow, Poland, dating from the socialist period. This non-functional structure, towering nakedly over the cityscape, epitomizes the shortcomings of the socialist project. A shadow of the artist playing electric guitar is cast over the projection. At first we hear just a few notes, but as they are filtered, looped and distorted, more complex sonic nuances emerge and pulsate with the flickering video. The music might be acting as the building’s mouthpiece, its lullaby-like melody extracting a faint, indistinct history, or, alternatively, pointing to a failed dialectical moment. Møller’s work refuses to produce a resolution; instead, it offers a surplus of dead ends and speculative positions. His work tends to start with a simple premise, then fracture into cryptic references and open onto obscure connections. Sometimes a resolution seems to be within one’s grasp, only to slip away into oblique tangents. It is as though every work in this exhibition presents a page from a book, a single event from an epoch. Even the exhibition’s title suggests unfinished business.
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