This Saturday, it’s Stattnacht at Stattbad, and there will be a vernissage and two days of celebrations. The show “Sunday Wisdom” by David Johansson consists of photographs of club entrances in Berlin on a Sunday morning.

Embracing the positive trend of events combining music with art (i.e. Party Arty), I wanted to know who David Johansson is, who is exhibiting his photographs.

About the exhbition:

“Sunday Wisdom” | David Johannson 2009-2011
50 Din A3 black & white photo prints

The Sunday Wisdom series is a result of failure.

Only a few have succeeded in capturing and justly conveying the moments that take place every Saturday in clubs all over the world in a few pictures. Maybe Danny Boyle’s “Trainspotting” or in a way even Jonas Akerlund’s “Smack My Bitch Up” for The Prodigy could be counted as a few very tasteful exceptions.

David Johannson took a different route.

He is not showing anything. Instead, all we get to see is places of silence, decay and spots of failure. Captured are the entrances of 50 clubs from the outside in Sunday’s cruel light, or whatever day it was. We just know that this was “the day after”.

Not much is seen of the interior but the experience could be perceived by reading the subjectively selected best-of-disco-lyrics quotations that accompany each print. The combination creates the content that one is searching for while looking at the pieces. Lines like “Something ’bout those little pills, unreal the thrills they yield” (Green Velvet) convey whatever might have been going on behind those doors.

David Johansson has his atelier in Wedding and he has already produced a lot of works. Actually, “David Johansson” is a moniker that he uses to strictly separate his work with his “therapy”, creating artwork.

With “therapy” he meant the aesthetic aspect: Failure, with what his exhibition is described above, first of all means the inability to implement the experiences you have in a club in visuals. Johansson takes movie segments as an example: You can try to play a club scene in a movie, or even film a scene in a club, but the outcome will never tell you how it really was. All remains as a mystery. It is very important for him that “therapy” is not misunderstood as negative thing, to get cured from an illness. Since he is not a commercial artist, he uses art as a medium to work on everyday’s thoughts beside his real job.

“Sunday Wisdom” is consisting of 50 pieces. Of the 50 clubs he caught on camera, he has been to more than half of them. In private, he seldom goes out. He rather goes to bed early and gets up at 6am on a Sunday morning, rides through the city with his bike and takes pictures.

Loads of clubs he took pictures of are not existing any more; for him, catching the entrances was important. His works include pictures of 40 Seconds, Adagio, but also bar25 and Salon zu wilden Renate. He does not evaluate the clubs, he just takes moments into his photographs.

Why the lyrics beneath each piece? The pictures in combination with the lyric lines beneath shall recall the songs to the observer. His intention is that you have automatically the melody in your head while you take a look at the exhibits.

Indeed, this idea is great. Nevertheless, the exhibition will only work 100% if the observer does know all the songs – the more music you recognize or have in your head, the more fun it is to watch the exhibition. Tricky.

EXCLUSIVELY for stylistberlin, he is presenting an unpublished piece of his works for the first time to the audience:

David Johansson”Stattbad Wedding”

And for those of you who don’t have immediately a clue which music is supposed to play in your heads: here is Corey Heart’s -“Sunglasses at night”

corey hart sunglasses at night von iowaluder

Take your time and visit his website: http://www.davidjohannson.de/art/NEW.html 

stylistberlin recommendation: The “Schlachtengemälde” with the Guy Fawkes masks are actually depicting today’s society. Check his other works out as well…!

See you Saturday!