Fluchtpunkt (2022)
Open duration performance-installation
Open duration performance-installation
Fluchtpunkt (vanishing point; place of refuge) is a light, sound and smoke installation invoking the fantasy world of 1990s Eurotrance. The work is highly adaptable and has been presented as an immersive, looped installation for galleries and club spaces, and staged as a ‘performance’ in front of a seated audience.
The work is a suspenseful choreography of animated stagecraft, including smoke machines, sound responsive lights and a dramatic audio landscape of submerged beats, sampled Eurodance vocals and extreme weather sounds (thunder and lightning, rain, wind); a recurring metaphor for conflict and resolution in 1990s dance music. Using hostile elemental effects and odd moments of pause and tension, the work keeps its audience perpetually at arms length; simulating a dance floor whilst denying a sense of straightforward escapism. In doing so, Fluchtpunkt invites you to reencounter the fantasy world of 1990s Eurodance and its disquieting, portentous rhetoric of utopia and disaster.
‘...A gestalt whose separate elements come together in an atmospheric manifestation of their conceptual elegance. Taking the viewer into the heart of its storm, in spite of its cues to dance – strobes, dry ice and a rhythmic soundtrack – (Fluchtpunkt) rewards a certain stillness. Static, the gallery-goer can give way to the experiences it offers; the dramatic approximations of thunder claps and running water, digitally contrived in a recording studio. Read from another perspective, its tumult acts as a reminder of the inescapability of the climate crisis. Caught up in the smoke of its urgency, somehow humanity does its best to ignore the fire, dancing all the while to its oblivion.’
- Desmond Bullen, Northern Soul, 2024
Fluchtpunkt at Salamagundy
curated by Mark Leckey
produced by The Turner Contemporary
performed at Dreamland,
Margate, 2022.
Video: Devan Clarke-Sheward
curated by Mark Leckey
produced by The Turner Contemporary
performed at Dreamland,
Margate, 2022.
Video: Devan Clarke-Sheward
Fluchtpunkt was originally commissioned by the Turner Contemporary Gallery in Margate for Salamagundy, a variety show curated by artist Mark Leckey. In this initial context, Fluchpunkt was installed on a theatrical stage in front of a seated audience at Dreamland’s historic Roller Rink. In lieu of a human performer, the work included a ‘Stars in Their Eyes’ style smoking doorway, theatrical curtains and roving spotlights, conjuring the space beyond the stage into a portal to an internal fantasy realm of the viewer’s own making.
Fluchtpunkt at Basket 3, SOUP,
Manchester, 2023.
Image credit: Will Gillibrand
2 min digest of phone footage taken
by audience members at SOUP