Published 13 DEC 2024

6 DEC until 11 JAN 2025

Esther Schipper is pleased to present Sähkö Recordings, a record shop devoted to the pioneering music label founded by Tommi Grönlund and celebrating over 30 years of its activity. As part of the artist duo Grönlund-Nisunen with Petteri Nisunen, Grönlund has had five solo exhibitions with the gallery. This is the gallery’s first focus on his work in the realm of experimental music.

Sähkö Recordings was founded in 1993 by Grönlund together with the pioneering, late Finnish musician and producer Mika Vainio, and has since been releasing one of the most distinctive and important discographies in electronic music. On view, and for sale, will be nearly 50 vinyls from its extensive output, alongside posters and ephemera documenting its history. Among the most well-known artists released on the label are Mika Vainio, an experimental electronic musician who helped define the genre and Jimi Tenor, an alternative jazz musician well-known in Finland.

Sähkö is the Finnish word for electricity. Many of its records feature sound that is arranged in terms of frequencies and tones, often the very sound of electricity or electrical equipment itself. The label’s logo recalls the undulating waves and straight lines of visualized sound curves, and the album covers often feature minimal artwork drawn in clean, geometrical shapes. In the name of his label, Grönlund thus encapsulates a major interest of his practice, shared both in his musical output and in his light- and sound-based artistic practice with Petteri Nisunen.

Branching beyond the original Sähkö label, Grönlund expanded into multiple sub-labels. Puu, or “wood” in Finnish, is the sub-label on which he releases Jimi Tenor’s music. Keys Of Life, started in 1999 with Harri Hännikäinen, is a sub-label devoted to house music, putting out records for example by Roberto Rodriguez, Skatebård or Tin Man. The sub-label Jazzpuu reissues old Finnish jazz records.

Parallels between his work on the label and as part of his collaboration with Nisunen, which also began in 1993, are apparent. In both practices, there is often a straightforward reflection, or amplification, of a physical process. Their aesthetic experiences are not elaborately mediated for effect but stripped down to simple, direct experiences of light, sound and movement in their basic forms. Blurring disciplinary boundaries, Grönlund has referred to Sähkö as an ongoing “art project,” and “an expression of elements that can be found in nature and in your surroundings.”

Tommi Grönlund was born 1967 in Turku, Finland. Grönlund attended the Tampere University
of Technology, School of Architecture. He lives and works in Helsinki.

For press inquiries please contact David Ulrichs. Tel: +49 (0) 176 50 33 01 35 or
david@davidulrichs.com.

14 DEC until 17 JAN 2025

Esther Schipper is pleased to announce Europe Endless, a presentation by Christopher Roth with Materials, Trailers, Out-Takes.

Christopher Roth’s presentation takes place on occasion of his forthcoming trilogy of films exploring the history of geographical and philosophical borderlands, family and friendship and the future. Setting the scene with sculptures of over dimensional bags of French Fries and a colorized edition of English PEL chairs (redesigned by Jasper Morrison for TYP) as a make-shift cinema, the presentation addresses Europe as a constantly moving target. The daytime opening in the gallery will feature a reading by Lukas Kubina from his new novel Boludo, followed in the evening by a concert by Macedoniasintetica (Carlo Camerin, Mattia Rigon, Simone Carraro) and a screening of Metagoon 24h by Matteo Stocco and Matteo Primiterra.

At the gallery a selection of materials and out-takes from the films will be screened. Roth’s trilogy—The Spectre of Eurocommunism, Infinite Histories, Look! We have come through! —is in the tradition of the essay film, weaving found footage, documentary and interviews to construct competing histories of Europe through personal stories, political ideas and the history of film. In recent years, Roth has developed his own style in this type of film, using writing, music and fictional elements to exaggerate things in order to create tension and new contexts.

The first film, The Spectre of Eurocommunism, reflects on the 1970s taking as its central nexus the life and work of Roth’s friend Colin MacCabe. The second, Infinite Histories, focuses on the end of the 1980s, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communist states in Eastern Europe told from the perspective of Lea Ypi, an acclaimed Albanian-British philosopher and political scientist, and Oana Bogdan, a Brussels-based Romanian architect and short-time secretary of state in Bucharest. With its shift into the year 2038, the third film alludes to Roth’s project for the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennial. In this film a series of never completely specified events have dramatically altered history, so that society has learned to harness the tremendous potential of immigration, to invent new forms of participatory politics, and to claim Europe as “Utopia, Newropa, Eutopia…” A new cast of younger thinkers and activists, such as the ‘digital Marx’ Evgeny Morozov from Belarus, the Italian economist and urban thinker Francesca Bria, the Swedish philosopher Martin Hägglund, and the British artist-activists Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn, provide new and optimistic perspectives, while participants in the earlier films make briefer appearances.

The sculptures on view, brightly colored overdimensional felt bags with large pieces of drift wood doubling as French fries, are a humorous nod to the idea of Europe Roth brings to his films. Each bag a different color, with the term French Fries in other European languages, the work draws on a communality alongside the differences. In addition, the work draws on an experience that imagines a world outside of the capitalist market economy: seeing toy-look-a-likes of bags of fries outside of a school in his Venice neighborhood, Roth was told by the young children they would only accept barter in exchange, no currency. The playful understanding of an exchange economy and the communality of the dish across Europe is a witty, lighthearted take on an ideal of Europe, and indirectly invokes the history of Marxist thought told in the new films.

Christopher Roth was born in Munich, Germany. He lives and works in Berlin and Venice.

Christopher Roth’s practice may be best understood as a kind of proactive intellectual scholarship that combines the factual and fictitious, with both analytic and poetic qualities. Roth’s work seeks to understand how information, words, pictures and ideas are received, travel and are mediated at a constantly accelerating pace. Since the 1990s, Roth has focused on the “emptiness” of single images and certain generic imagery that surround us. These images only accrue meaning in context—a function easily manipulated by the mass media. This knowledge — acquired and practiced as an accomplished film editor and director of feature films and given theoretical underpinnings by his engagement with cultural history and philosophy—informs his entire practice.

Roth’s film Baader was awarded in the Silver Bear category at the 2002 Berlinale and was restored in 2023.

Selected projects include:
So Long Daddy, See You in Hell premiered at the Munich Film Festival 2022 and ran in competition in Tallinn. Roth was one of the curators of the German pavilion at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale. He made with Brandlhuber+: The Property Drama (Chicago Biennial 2017), Legislating Architecture (Venice Biennale, 2016), and Architecting after Politics (AUT Tirol, vai) and with Colin MacCabe and Tilda Swinton The Seasons in Quincy, Four Portraits of John Berger (Berlinale, 2016). In 2018, Roth launched space-time.tv – a cooperative television platform that now has four channels. Currently he is a visiting professor at the Hong Kong University and shoots a film about the architect John Lin all over China.