Antje Dorn - Rare Animals And Numbers

Opening Reception, Friday, September 12, 2008, 7 pm

09/12/08 – 11/03/08

 

“Rare Animals and Numbers” is the title of the latest work from Antje Dorn and also the title of the next exhibition at zone B (Berlin).

 

Despite the ever present digital imperialism of numbers in one and zero combinations, and the increasing numbers of cloned creatures from one and the same animal, Antje Dorn gives us a universe of rare animals and analogue, corporeal numerals.

 

These corporeal ciphers consist of free radical figure combinations from zero and one up to nine.

 

With charcoal and ink, the artist covers both small (29.2 x 42 centimeters) and large (2 x 3 meters) format sheets with a score of rare animals in a world populated with lively, gay, enchanted numerical forms.

 

Already in 1995 in “Cookie Park,” Ms. Dorn designed a virtuoso decoding machine in the form of a voluminous reference book. It is the base for her further explorations and made possible her current creations in “Rare Animals and Numbers.” This show refers also to her exhibit last year at zone E (Essen), “Imbisse” (“Snack Bars”); the tectonics of the architectural structures there prefigure the numerical bodies which form the living-space of these quite rare and entranced fauna. In this image-space, and through its perspective magic, a modular cipherworld calls, referencing Giotto’s pre-discovery of perspective.

 

In a minimalistic performance, the artist creates a spacial score of autonomous numbers and signs, one that- through beat, rhythm, cadence and crescendo- tunes the tone forest so that the animals feel at home.

 

Despite and through the omnipotent, omnipresent presence of numerical codes, our daily life is at once estranged and enchanted by the figured bodies of past, present and future millenniums, centuries, years, months, weeks, days, hours, seconds, etc… in our displacement to an un-really existing number-jungle-paradise.

 

We are everywhere and always played upon by numbers in measurements of kilometers, meters, centimeters, millimeters, tenths-, hundredths-, and thousandths-… Millimeters suggest, orient, prognosticate, falsify, correct, ratify and manipulate, with an absolute grip, to the smallest unit. With numberless numbers, thinner than the slash of a razorblade, they dissect each and all, only to once again numerically reassemble it

 

Without the correct reassembly, there is no cash at the cash machine, no entrance to the internet, no letter from the beloved.

 

The omnipresence of numbers has long ago in art struck “eighteen” and “twenty” o’clock. It is high time that rare animals and numbers of the jungle enrich and guide us to a paradise of the future. Knut Wolfgang Maron