Pairs: Conversation Piece, 1965 (2012)

In 1965 the “POEX” took place in Copenhagen. It was a 10-day-event mixing poetry, music and visual arts. The event was arranged by artist Knud Hvidberg, and during the planning a lot of meetings with the involved artist took place. One of these meetings was carefully documented by artist Kirsten Lockenwitz. During the research we found 7 of the original 8 pages of this document. The text of these pages forms the content of the piece. “Pairs: Conversation Piece, 1965” consists of 2 “listening-chairs” and 8 “artist-chairs”. Each artist-chair is marked by the name of one of the artists taking part in the original meeting in 1965. If you sit on a listening chair, you will hear the arguments from the nearby artists-chairs. If you place your listening-chair between two artist-chairs, you will be hearing sections of the meeting where these two artists were in dispute. Listening-chairs are relaying the debate. If you place a second listening-chair next to an activated listening-chair, the debate will be transferred on to your chair.

"Pairs: Conversation Piece, 1965" was produced for the “Unheard Avant-Garde, Scandinavia” section at the “Sound Art - Klang als Medium der Kunst” exhibition at ZKM, Germany. At the show the project was presented under the title "POEX Chairs". The work was based on the research of associate professor Morten Søndergaard, AAU.

Thanks to:

Curators (ZKM): Peter Weibel & Julia Gerlach. Curator (Scandinavia): Morten Søndergaard.
Translation: Morten Søndergaard. Audio content recording: Morten Søndergaard. Audio restoration & design: Emil Alenius Boserup, AEOEAA.
Chairs and painting: Danish Radio Decoration Department, Henrik Juul Nielsen. Visual design & typography: Salomet.
Technical support team at ZKM.
The project was cofunded by the LARM research project, “The Unheard Avant-Garde”.