The photos of Tanz in Sicht will be exhibited in NYC:

Opening
Thursday March 22nd 2007
Open
March 23rd - 31st 2007

Milk Gallery | 450 West 15th Street | New York City 10011

Photos of ecstatic crowds dancing to repetitive beats are all too familiar: each individual's choreographic efforts disappear into a collective experience in the mass of bodies.



Ingo Kniest's photo series "Tanz in Sicht" reverses this principle by showing each individual alone, dancing on the verge of the throng.

The photos afford an intimate insight to the extreme differentiation within an often rigidly defined subculture.

Kniest set up a mobile photo studio next to the dance floor and photographed single dancers life-sized. The dancer stands alone in front of a monochrome background, which becomes a silent echo of the sonic din removed by the photographic medium. It is as though the dancer has been removed from the mass with a scalpel, left to drift freely in isolation.

The photographic efforts resulted in a series of eight pictures. The effect is impressive. Eight motifs, eight dancers, eight personalities. The brilliance and sheer dimensions of the photos make their observation to an intimate act.

"Tanz in Sicht" lives in the context of music and photography, from the immediate relationship between hearing and seeing.


Kniest then built up around him a group of young artists and technicians who worked within the conceptual framework of the photos to take the work to a new level.

The life-sized prints were to be presented in a room equipped with a network of sensors which track the movements of visitors, and according to their behaviour, trigger pre-programmed audio loops. Specially developed software acts as a conductor to the sensory information, turning the room into a living soundscape. Observers of Kniest's shock-frozen portraits become the directors of new repetitive beats. Relationships here are reversed. The ecstatic dancers are captured utterly still; the visitors become the ever-moving mass. Together a unique symbiosis is formed:
Tanz in Sicht.


Translators note:
The title "Tanz in Sicht" translates directly to "Dance in Sight". The meaning however is a little more diffuse. It is the suggestion that the act of dancing is a possibility for the near future, as though later on "dancing will be very likely". Further than this though, and possibly too remote to be deliberate, is that the word "Sicht" is close to the word "Sich" or "self", making the title a self-reflexive comment on the act of dancing.

translated by Ian Warner