Honey-Suckle Company
The Honey-Suckle Company is an Art collective based in Berlin.
Since 1999 the Honey-Suckle Company has collaborated with the musician Konrad Sprenger. The cooperation has brought contemporary music composition and sound installation to the work of the group. Together they realize pieces from their ideas; especially instruments that play by themselves, one of Konrad Sprenger’s special fields, have become part of the installations. Konrad Sprenger’s arrangement of sound often functions as a soundtrack in the installations of the Honey-Suckle Company. Whereas all the other members put the individuality of their artistic work in the background, Konrad Sprenger remains an autonomous figure within the group. This tension has offered the possibility to experience the pieces of Honey-Suckle Company and Konrad Sprenger from either a subjective or a conceptually understood point of view.
Many of the constructions of sound have evolved from a process of mutual inspiration. For the installation Eswerde, the Honey-Suckle Company built three mechanically revolving harps in 2003, and thereby continued the work of Konrad Sprenger who - since 1997 – had been building various mechanical string and wind instruments, including a bass banjo. For the same installation, the group built a room-hurdy-gurdy inspired by, among others, the Long String Instrument conceived by Ellen Fullman, with whom Konrad Sprenger had produced the record "Ort".
The room-hurdy-gurdy, a huge hand-organ set into a room, appears in the pieces Eswerde and Einstellung, beside the revolving harps and the self-playing instruments. The low sounds of this hurdy-gurdy, with the almost tuneless croaking of the revolving harps, form several layers of melodic patterns which remind one of the Japanese Gagaku-music or the pleasant splashing of the repetitive movements of one of Jean Tinguely’s springs; whereas the low sounds of the drum in Eswerde, produced on the soundboard of the hurdy-gurdy, created a sublime stomping energy.
Performance and Installation Projects:
2008 “Neuband 2008“, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt
2007 “Reihe: Ordnung sagt Liebe“, Harburger Kunstverein, Hamburg
2006 “eau d’ohn end”, Gallery Giti Nourbakhsch, Berlin
2006 Installation “non est hic”, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel
10“ record “non est hit”, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel
2005 “Ohn End”, Cubitt Gallery, London
2003 “Eswerde”, Künstlerhaus, Stuttgart
2000 “Neuband”, Sonar-festival, Barcelona
1999 “Neu Westend”, PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York
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Excerpts from the booklet of the 10" record "non est hit" that was produced in conjunction with the exhibition:
Honey-Suckle Company – non est hic
In cooperation with Konrad Sprenger Kunsthalle Basel, 02.04. – 28.05.2006
The initial ghostly snoring sound in the piece Eau d’Ohn End has a frightening but also burlesque effect. Only after some time, a zither answers and creates a dream world carpet of sound through quiet rhythm. In the end, all that remains is the croaking of the revolving harp from the beginning.
Konrad Sprenger’s self-playing instruments, which recall his cooperation with Arnold Dreyblatt, leave an almost hypnotic effect in the pieces Einstellungen and Neuband 2006. In addition, in Neuband 2006, a self-playing motor- guitar steers towards three more guitars over an electronic interface (gate) . This piece was performed for the first time in Honey-Suckle Company’s installation at Sonar Festival, Barcelona, in 2000, which is documented by the last piece on the record.
Honey-Suckle Company and Konrad Sprenger’s music often has a ‘timeless’ effect, seemingly repetitive in an entranced way, and totally focused on the moment. This is also present in the almost ‘Krautrock’ piece Odessau, although here cello, sticks, percussion, bass and synthesizer do without ‘endless’ sounds. In Ohn End the six members create an atmosphere of infinity with their organ-like singing, produced by recordings of the members’ individual voices played through six cd systems and boxes, set at random and repeat modes.
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About the HONEY-SUCKLE COMPANY
The 1990s were marked by a significant shift among artists towards new modes of collaboration aimed at producing workable models of alternative micro-social relationships. The goal of these self-organized structures, in which artists and creative individuals of various professions took part, was to sustain cultural production using the participants’ own modest means, and to remain in control of this production through establishing independent channels of distribution, such as magazines, clubs, galleries and record labels. This move towards sharing experience and transforming existence, and towards a more open-ended concept of artwork, which opposed the essentialist fixation on objects prevailing on the art-market and valued by most museums, was largely made possible by the establishment of collective working practices. Several important art collectives were formed in Germany. Following the long tradition of spiritual and intellectual communities, which have opposed official state culture there since the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and which seemed to be in decline at the end of the 20th century, the Honey-Suckle Company, an elusive and radical group of artists, came to being in Berlin around 1995.
A detailed history of the HSC has yet to be written, and it will pose a difficult task to art historians, especially given that so far the HSC has cleverly defied any attempt at pigeonholing their multifarious activities and manifestations. However, during the past few years the HSC has decided to give more definite shape to their intimate collaboration in several installations, realized as immersive and iconographically complex settings, in an ambiguous way reminiscent of many past poetics and movements in art, but also, in their structure, of religious heterodoxies and holistic philosophical systems.
The HSC shows blend styles and motifs borrowed from different artistic and spiritual movements, such as Bauhaus or Russian Productivism, which aimed at comprehensive transformation of all spheres of human creativity; at the same time they incorporated distinctively ‘other’ traditions in the European culture, for instance of medieval wandering musicians’ groups playing the Hurdy-Gurdy, whose noisy performances opposed a stifling high culture with the subversive energy of the ‘holy fools’. The HSC presentations begin with short-lived performative acts and their exhibitions integrate the leftover from the performances and photo shoots into architectural structures built of recycled scrap material. In their ecstatic-Dionysian or meditative-Minimal dance sessions, the HSC and other participants wear special costumes of an otherworldly and timeless design, reminding of mysteries theatre.
Music is capable of carrying rich messages and attitudes; it induces passing moods and alters perception. Quite rightly, the HSC have used music to confuse their audiences and destabilize and upset their firm expectation of only having visual pleasure at exhibitions. With music everything goes better, declared the HSC’s motto in a modest and carefully edited publication displayed on music stands as part of the exhibition Ohn End at London’s Cubitt gallery in July 2005. The show captured the viewers’ attention, but having popped in on the wrong day or perhaps at the wrong time, we did not hear any music – the sound was off. Therefore it seemed logical and necessary to enable the HSC, collaborating with the musician Konrad Sprenger since 1999, to produce their first music recording ever on the occasion of the solo Honey-Suckle Company show at the Kunsthalle Basel in April 2006 – to the sheer delight of the happy few and despite all the constraints and reservations which make any heterogeneous group undertaking a difficult task.
Honey-Suckle Company are: Petr. S. Kisur, Nico Ihlein, Zille Homma Hamid, Ninja Pleasure, Simone Gilges, Friedrich M. Lloch
Herausgeber/Editor: Adam Szymczyk
All photographs: © 2006 Honey-Suckle Company
2005, “OHN END”, Cubitt, London
6-Channel Sound Installation
2005, “OHN END”, Cubitt, London
6-Channel Sound Installation
2006, "NON EST HIC", Kunsthalle Basel
Installation with 6 rotating HSS Hyper-Directional Speakers
2006, "NON EST HIC", Kunsthalle Basel
Installation with 6 rotating HSS Hyper-Directional Speakers
2006, "NON EST HIC", Kunsthalle Basel
Installation with 6 rotating HSS Hyper-Directional Speakers
2003, “Eswerde”, Reigen, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart
2003, “Eswerde”, Reigen, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart
2003, “Hurdy Gurdy Raum”, solo, Neue Dokumente, Berlin
2000, “NEUBAND”, Re-present Berlin, Sonar Festival,Barcelona
Motor Guitar+ selfplaying Snare-Drum
2000, “NEUBAND”, Re-present Berlin, Sonar Festival,Barcelona
2000, Motor-Guitar
2001, “ODESSAU”,Glaspavillon derVolksbühne Berlin
Motor Guitar+ Hurdy Grurdy
2001, “ODESSAU”,Glaspavillon derVolksbühne Berlin
Motor Guitar+ selfplaying Snare-Drum+ Bass Banjo+ Hurdy Gurdy
2001, “ODESSAU”,Glaspavillon derVolksbühne Berlin
2001, “ODESSAU”,Glaspavillon derVolksbühne Berlin
2001, “ODESSAU”,Glaspavillon derVolksbühne Berlin
Bass Banjo+ Hurdy Gurdy