LEXICON -

Leon Duncan grew up in Nairobi, Kenya blinding debut volley of industro-dub and free-jazzed electronics, signed for Hakuna Kulala. Together with vocalist Martin Kanja (now half of Nyege Nyege’s Duma), they developed an idiosyncratic form of Kenyan industrial music.

Carlfriedrich Claus is one of the most important representatives of international visual and phonetic poetry. In the 1950s, he began examining language and writing in terms of their tonal and visual content, based on his first experimental poems. At the time, writers and artists around the world were exploring similar questions, and a network of like-minded individuals developed, in which Claus was a highly regarded figure despite being isolated in the German Democratic Republic. Claus understood his life, and with this also his artistic work, as a continuous self-experiment. He created his first acoustic works in the late 1950s as an extension of his written sound notations. His speech exercises, in which he superimposed his own voice with ambient noises, broke with traditional articulation techniques. At the same time, he produced intricate drawings that visualise the process of speech and vibrations in the body. From the 1960s onwards, Claus processed his theoretical reflections on phonetics and human communication in the form of his speech sheets. He always considered these works to be a distinct form of literature. Combining symbolic elements with legible and illegible writing, they stimulate viewers’ thought processes. After a break, Claus only continued his work on acoustic literature in the 1980s. Independent of the written or spoken word, he investigated pre-linguistic processes – the sounds that arise before articulation and thus capture emotional states. Through this work, he explored themes such as human consciousness and subconsciousness, both in his written pieces and in his sound processes. His self-experiments were intended to continue to stimulate the audience and encourage self-reflection. In 1995, he developed the Lautprozessraum (Sound-Processing Room), a sound installation at the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz that allowed visitors to control sound events independently through their movements. Carlfriedrich Claus (1930 – 1998) was an artist and philosopher who crossed borders. His work unfolds between poetry, drawing, graphics, and acoustics in language and sound. He saw his work as a tireless experiment and explored the media in their inner contexts, their origins, and anthropological justification and meaning. Claus drew his “language sheets”, which are both image and text and refer to various sources, in a linear style: In addition to Jewish mysticism, natural science, and cybernetics, the artist often also reacted to political events related to the time. His historical-philosophical reflections were oriented towards holistic models of the world between Paracelsus, Marx, and Ernst Bloch. Carlfriedrich Claus never made a secret of his basic utopian-communist attitude. He was concerned with overcoming alienated existence through the “naturalisation of man and the humanisation of nature”.

Anish Kapoor is an Indian-born British sculptor known for his use of abstract biomorphic forms and his penchant for rich colours and polished surfaces. He was also the first living artist to be given a solo show at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. During the 1980s and ’90s, Kapoor was increasingly recognized for his biomorphic sculptures and installations, made with materials as varied as stone, aluminum, and resin, that appeared to challenge gravity, depth, and perception. In 1990, he represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale with his installation “Void Field?, a grid of rough sandstone blocks, each with a mysterious black hole penetrating its top surface. The following year, he was honoured with the Turner Prize, a prestigious award for contemporary art. Kapoor continued to explore the idea of the void during the remainder of the decade, creating a series of works that incorporated constructions that receded into walls, disappeared into floors, or dramatically changed depth with a simple change in perspective. In the early 21st century, Kapoor’s interest in addressing site and architecture led him to create projects that were increasingly ambitious in scale and construction. For his 2002 installation Marsyas at the Tate Modern gallery in London, Kapoor created a trumpet-like form by erecting three massive steel rings joined by a 550-foot (155-metre) span of fleshy red plastic membrane that stretched the length of the museum’s Turbine Hall. In 2004, Kapoor unveiled Cloud Gate in Chicago’s Millennium Park; the 110-ton elliptical archway of highly polished stainless steel—nicknamed “The Bean”—was his first permanent site-specific installation in the United States. For just over a month in 2006, Kapoor’s Sky Mirror, a concave stainless-steel mirror 35 feet (11 metres) in diameter, was installed in New York City’s Rockefeller Center. Both Cloud Gate and Sky Mirror reflected and transformed their surroundings and demonstrated Kapoor’s ongoing investigation of material, form, and space. In 2022, a retrospective of Kapoor’s work was held at the Galleries of the Academy of Venice, along with an exhibition at the nearby Palazzo Priuli Manfrin. The latter was a former mansion in Venice that the Anish Kapoor Foundation began renovating in 2021 to house its headquarters, an exhibition space, and a studio. Both shows debuted several Kapoor’s highly anticipated sculptures painted with Vantablack, considered the blackest black paint because it absorbs nearly all light.