hbd
A solo exhibition by Tobi Keck
The multimedia installation hbd at SB – Space Between reissues the exhibition “Happy Birthday” by Tobi Keck, which was on display at Mikky Burg in Dresden in 2018. The artist has retained its fundamental elements for the presentation in Nuremberg. However, their arrangement and dimensions have been adapted to the local space, giving the work an aesthetic and thematic emphasis.
Tobi Keck (*1987) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg and the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts and is now based in Berlin. He uses a wide range of artistic materials, techniques, media, and forms of expression in his multimedia and transdisciplinary works. His works reflect fundamental human experiences such as fear, escapism, temporality, decay, and transience, but also the shift from analog to digital technologies and their interplay, as well as their impact on our experiences and communication.
The presentation consists of a field of 123 champagne bottles standing irregularly across the barred floor of the exhibition space. The bottles are sealed with white plastic corks and filled with a greenish-clear liquid. Their color saturation gradually decreases from left to right, creating a color gradient across the grid floor from intense green to light green to completely colorless, as if the color were slowly fading as one walks through the room.
The champagne bottles on the floor correspond to 123 poppy capsule stems made of plaster, which are mounted on the front main wall like arrows, also at irregular intervals and at right angles to the gray concrete wall. The delicate white plaster structures are reproductions of eight original casts of dried opium poppy capsules. The field of bottles on the floor and the poppy field on the wall are each assigned a large black rectangular loudspeaker box, which has been installed standing on the floor and mounted on the wall. Both boxes emit the sound of a constantly blowing sharp wind.
Poppies are an ambivalent symbol. Red poppy flowers represent sacrifice and remembrance, but the plant is also considered a symbol of the earth, sleep, and oblivion. Morphine, opium, and heroin are extracted from the sap of the opium poppy. In hbd, the poppy plants are motionless skeletons without movement, color, or sap. The crown-head of the capsule evokes the shape of an asterisk, the typographical symbol with five or six points, also known as a “star.” In texts, the asterisk is used to indicate a footnote, as a placeholder, and as a symbol for the year of birth (hbd is short for “happy birthday” on social media), for gender diversity, or for the unoccupied, the unexplored.
The interplay of these disparate, often contradictory elements—color and materiality, sound and feeling, surface and space, direction and perspective, symbol and sign, etc.—creates a field of reference that is as paradoxical as it is playful, evoking the supposed givens of life and death and immediately reversing and reinterpreting them. What is green fades; what is colorless appears green; what is liquid stands upright; what we hear we cannot feel; what grows out of the earth sprouts sideways out of the wall; what shines in the night sky becomes a symbol of not knowing what to do next. With hbd, Tobi Keck creates a barren, surreal landscape whose contrasting aesthetics open up a wealth of time-critical metaphors.
Text by Teresa Ende @teresaende
(*Translated from German original into English via A.I.)