18 Jun 2010

Daniel Gustav Cramer at Dortmunder Kunstverein

Daniel Gustav Cramer
Acht Arbeiten / Eight Works

18 June - 8 August 2010
Opening: Friday 18 June, 7 pm
Dortmunder Kunstverein, Dortmund

The Dortmunder Kunstverein is pleased to announce the exhibition Acht Arbeiten/ Eight Works by Daniel Gustav Cramer (born 1975). This is Cramer´s first solo exhibition in an institutional exhibition space in Germany. For the Dortmunder Kunstverein Daniel will continue his recent exhibition series of „Arbeiten/ Works', groupings of individual works as fragments, which propose a picture of a world as a space of invisible links and connections.

A photograph of the Eusebius – Jerome – Manuscript, the oldest book stored in the celars of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, forms the centre of the exhibition.This manuscript is the first detailed chronology of the history of mankind describing various accounts of time from the Greek Olympiads, to the regal years of roman emperors counting in yearly cycles, reaching from Adam and Eve to about A.D. 378, the year of the release of the Manuscript. On the photograph the book is placed flat on a table, closed, lid by natural light falling through a window nearby. History, complete, yet inaccesible. A compilation of individuals who disappeared one by one in the stream of everything. This double withdrawal, a closed book - photographed, a peak of inaccesibility, opens up another relation to the shown object and its attempt to capture the time of history. Further more, the obscured content of this book is a structure of facts, numbers creating fiction.

On a found photograph taken by a NASA photographer from a helicopter, crowds of people are gathering at Kennedy Space Center in the summer of 1969. The photograph was taken adjescent to the first manned lunar landing mission of astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr. The black and white image shows a field covered with vans, tents and people. The size of an individual person between the cars suggests the magnificent distance lying ahead of the astronauts. Reinhold Messner, the first mountain climber to reach the peak of Mount Everest without using oxygen stated: „If one of us climbes the highest mountain, all of us, humankind did it.'

In Summer 2009 Daniel flew to the Wolfe Creek Crater in Australia´s desert to document it during sunset. The plane circled around the crater over and over again. In the video the crater´s appearance establishes an eliptic shape in constant motion – nothing in the image is still except the composition itself. The crater moves in full circle, like the hand of a clock and the earth´s journey around the sun.

In Cramer´s work, everything relates: a minute fragment, the gesture of a hand, a planet moving through space. The works feel like reminders or markers bringing touching simple questions relating to existence and being: who am I? How do I relate to you, the other, the world surrounding me? What kind of time is caught in a trace about to vanish?

Daniel Gustav Cramer studied at the Royal College of Art, London and has recently returned from a residency at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford in collaboration with the VCA, Melbourne. He took part in the Athens Biennale. Recently his work has been shown at Archive Kabinett, Berlin, BolteLang, Zurich, Kimmerich Gallery, New York, Athens Biennale, Museum Schloss Moyland, Germany, Tulips & Roses, Vilnius, The Return, Dublin, Vera Cortes, Lisbon.


An artist book will be published by The Green Box, Berlin, generosly supported by the Kunststiftung NRW, Goethe Institute Dublin and RWE Stiftung.