Seven seminal works by Simon Starling and Superflex in a dialogical setting.
Reprototypes, Triangulations and Road Tests brings together seven seminal works by Simon Starling and Superflex in a dialogical setting—among them Exposition (2004), Three Birds, Seven Stories, Interpolation and Bifurcations (2007–08), D1 – Z1 (22,686,575:1) (2009), Black Out (2009), and Kuh (2012). These works “collapse” as unstable complexes around pertinent themes whose triangulated speculations are articulated by undisciplined objects, piercing through the layers of time and history and revisiting long-held certainties. Posited as reprototypes, they reveal various strategies for siting the contemporary within the modern, resuscitating objects and innovations out of obsolescence, testing their contemporary vitality and thus disrupting the self-sufficiency of the modernist canon.
The publication includes contributions from philosopher Robin Mackay, architectural historians Esther da Costa Meyer and Venugopal Maddipati, media and cultural historian Birgit Schneider, the exhibition curators Eva Wilson and Daniela Zyman, and philosopher Mirjam Schaub.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at the newly inaugurated Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary exhibition space at Augarten in 2012.
Based on intensive research and (self-)experimentation, the works of Turner Prize winner Simon Starling (born 1967 in in Epsom, Surrey, lives and works in Copenhagen and berlin) works take the form of multipart installations that incorporate technological trappings, films, photography, objects, performance, and publications. With a sharp interest in and a decisive concern for the historical and especially the history of science and technology, Starling implicates history's untimely workings in the present.
Superflex is an artists' group founded in 1993 by Jakob Fenger, Rasmus Nielsen and Bjørnstjerne Christiansen in Copenhagen. Superflex describe their projects as “tools”, conceived as models or proposals that can actively be used and further utilized and modified by the user.
