FLORIAN CLAAR
LUMIN-HAUS, RIVERSIDE PARK
Florian Claar is known internationally for his technically complex sculptural and video works. He currently teaches in the sculpture department at Tama Art University in Japan and lives and works between Japan and Germany.
Wanderer originated while listening to music. The places depicted in the video are drawn from real places, fictional locations and dreams, layered and combined in a series of chambers. As the wanderer moves slowly through the chambers the camera looks forward and backward in time on a single line and is the only active element in the scene. Arranged as a single continuous movement, it takes on the viewpoint of the minds eye following a thought.
In Richard Wagner’s “Parsifal” Gurnemanz says to Parsifal while walking through a forest “Du siehst, … zum Raum wird hier die Zeit.” (“You see…here time becomes space”). Evoking music’s visual narrative, the shape and dimensions of the chambers in the Wanderer are directly related to the score. The composition is the blueprint for the architecture of the surrounding space. Composers like Mahler, Sibelius and Ives were inspired by the beat and rhythm from wanderings through mountains, landscapes and cities; for example, Mahler’s Symphony no. 3: What the forest tells me, What the trees tell me, What twilight tells me. Wanderer explores this relationship between the body, nature and sound.
Florian Claar
Wanderer, 2014
Digital video with sound
10 minute loop
Photos: Devon Lindsay, 2014