Kata Kovács and Tom O’Doherty — Carried Bells (Daily Walks)

About

Hošek Contemporary is pleased to invite you to the online screening of ‘Carried Bells (Daily Walks)’ by Kata Kovács and Tom O'Doherty.

‘Carried Bells (Daily Walks)’ is a video which was originally presented at Hošek Contemporary in October 2019, as one part of the durational installation ‘Carried Bells’. The video was generated over the twenty-day course of the development of the installation, as documentation of walks that were undertaken by the two artists throughout the city of Berlin.

‘Carried Bells’ was an exhibition based around the sound of bells in the city being recorded and ‘carried’ — through re-playing these recordings as the artists walked, via small hand-held speakers.

What nobody could have known at the time was that, inadvertently, this daily process and its accompanying documentation was generating a portrait of a pre-pandemic city. In the time since the videos were first captured, the world has been turned inside-out. The visual record that was created back in late 2019 has taken on a very different hue. This video is only a year and a half old, but already seems, in a way, like looking at a different era. Partly because of this newly-acquired contextual patina, we were eager to re-present the work, as a live-stream, the now-ubiquitous online adaptation of artistic presentation in the pandemic.

Every photograph, every film clip, is a method of attempting to archive a particular perspective — to trap it in amber, to allow it to be returned to, re-examined. This video, assembled from the serendipitous overlapping events of the street life of the city, captures many unexpected and unforeseen fragments of the urban hum in its daily process. The walks that the artists performed encompassed Tempelhofer Feld and Görlitzer Park, late-summer light and autumnal leaves, climate-change protests and bustling outdoor markets. They include glimpses of many of the familiar sights of the city, but also the quotidian reality of motorway bridges, traffic lights, Plattenbauen, and canals.

Throughout all of this, there are no masks, no social-distancing, no advertisements for test centers, no transparent plexiglass separators. The effect is one that is both strange and comforting. We all yearn to return to streets like these, and yet in watching video of them, we also can find ourselves recoiling from them, with our newly-learned habits of separation and vigilance. How long will it take us to unlearn these habits, once it becomes possible to be able to do so? What will it be like to attempt to return to crowded and bustling streets?

The uncanny impression of the video is only heightened by the soundtrack — the work, after all, was documenting the ‘carrying’ of these recordings of bells. So each scene has a corresponding tolling and pealing. A sound that can be interpreted as joyous, but that it is also difficult not to regard with a sort of ominous dread, knowing now what was to come.

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About the artists:

Kata Kovács and Tom O’Doherty have worked as a collaborative duo since 2011. Their work combines elements of durational and time-based art, minimalist movement, and electroacoustic music and sound. They are interested in processes, sounds, and movements that come close to imperceptibility, and the ways in which this material can be transformed through repetition, patterning, layering, and archiving.

They have exhibited and presented work at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Serralves Museum, Porto; National Museum of Contemporary Art (Chiado), Lisbon; Hošek Contemporary, Berlin; Kunstkraftwerk, Leipzig; and Digital in Berlin’s Kiezsalon series, Berlin, among others. They have been recipients of the LACMA Art + Technology Lab Award, and of the NeustartKultur Stipendenprogram of Musikfonds. They live and work in Berlin, Germany.

www.kovacsodoherty.com
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Contact:
Petr Hošek
MS HEIMATLAND
near Fischerinsel 3
10179 Berlin
+49 1525 7486496
info@hosekcontemporary.com
www.hosekcontemporary.com