Carsten Nicolai is a busy man: not only is the Berlin-based artist currently in the process of transforming the façade of the Temporäre Kunsthalle in Berlin, he also has a new show opening at The Pace Gallery in New York this Thursday exploring moirés, the visual interference of conflicting grid systems. The exhibition will also preview his new book Moiré, the follow-up to last year’s hugely successful Grid Index, an archive of grid systems. Sounds kind of dry? Well, Carsten Nicolai has built his entire reputation as an artist and musician on extracting a lyrical beauty from numbers and systems, so why don’t you let yourself be seduced. But if you prefer it a bit more hands-on, Nicolai is about to release a collaborative EP as anbb with none other than Blixa Bargeld, the legendary voice and frontman of Einstürzende Neubauten, which weirdly enough is closer in spirit to the Neubauten’s influential recordings from the 1980’s than anything they have released in the past decade.
You can catch up on Nicolai’s recent activities in an excellent essay in the current issue of The Wire, or you can cover the basics with our very own and very first issue of mono.kultur – sadly sold out yet once again, but we have a free PDF download for you here, at the bottom of the page.
Photography by Kai von Rabenau, published in The Wire #316
Pattern from Moiré by Carsten Nicolai
