Anne Chris Bakker & Sabine Bürger:
This video clip shows a 2:35 min excerpt from Neander's Hollow
1-channel video, 14:14 min
Neander's Hollow (2017)
An audio-visual installation at Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf, Berger Allee 2, 40213 Düsseldorf
28 Sept – 18 Dec 2018
Thursday, 25 October 2018
6 pm A discussion about the exhibition Neander's Hollow between the curator Christoph Danelzik- Brüggemann, video artist Sabine Bürger, and the electronic musician Anne Chris Bakker
7.15 pm Live concert by Anne Chris Bakker
Neander's Hollow is a collaborative piece by video artist Sabine Bürger (D) and electronic musician Anne Chris Bakker (NL), who performed for the video camera in the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf, the site where in 1856 evidence of Homo Neandertalensis was found – an area rich in geological history whose 400 million year old landscape was almost completely destroyed by the industrial quarrying of limestone in the middle of the 19th century.
'Neander's Hollow' is an old name for the valley when it was still a deep gorge with waterfalls and caves. Anne Chris Bakker and Sabine Bürger were inspired by descriptions of how from the 17th century onwards painters and poets descended into the valley to paint or write poetry, as did musicians to play music in solitude.
The old Neandertal was captured in works by the Düsseldorf School of painters, who ventured out into nature for inspiration. The audio-visual work is set in dialogue with views of the 'Neanderhöhle', in paint and print, owned by the Stadtmuseum – as well as the genome of the first Neanderthaler who was discovered in the site in 1856, and which was sequenced by Dr. Kay Prüfer at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. The Genome project team at the Department of Evelutionary Genetics under the supervision of Svante Pääbo provided evidence of the close genetic relationship to modern-day humans.
Installation view Neander's Hollow, September 2018, Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf
J.B. Sonderland: Künstlerfest in der Neanderhöhle (1826), lithograph, 40.6 x 57.9 cm. Courtesy of Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf
Anne Chris Bakker is a sound artist and experimental musician. His work resides somewhere between electro-acoustic, experimental, ambient and minimal music.
Neander's Hollow was premiered in December 2017 at MAF2017, Stichting Media Art Friesland, Leeuwarden/NL
