#tankhiphop

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Frihed, Lighed og Hip Hop (Freedom, Liberty and HipHop) the next part of Tank HipHop at @sydhavnstation this November #tankhiphop #artistrun #counterfactualhistory #hiphop #laboutmovement (at Sydhavn station) https://www.instagram.com/p/CnMxlPstyva/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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A home knitted sweater of the kind that slovenian friends tell me were extremely popular after the split up of slovenia draped across a Lupina chair designed by **Niko Kralj, who is sometimrs called the founder of Slovenian industrial design, in the 60ies.** On the sweater plastic gold letters read "rethink the past, change the future". A variation of hip-hop back patches on jeans jackets that were so popular in early days of danish hip-hop. In those distant times before the internet, we had only indirect and occasional access to low-resolution black and white images of graffiti and breakdance, and a single tape with a few minutes of rap recorded from the Danish national radio. We did not know where to go or who to ask, but we all agreed that none of what was offered up at the local youth club or in the mainstream media was of any interest.  What little we knew of hip hop offered an escape from what seemed to be an inevitable absorption into the dreary mainstream of pop culture. Our localized version of the hip-hop culture remained an imaginary, fundamentally misunderstood and now long forgotten minor version of the global hip-hop culture I later came to know. However, fashioning the everyday into something with new meaning, as we attempted to do with the jeans jackets, carries within it the seeds of an alternative future and the possibility of changing the present order of things. A forgotten and unwritten local tradition, very much in line with the historical avant-gardes. This is a connection that I hope to make visible and relevant through the Tank Hip Hop project, as a way to open up new possibilities and alternative histories. Retroavantgarde a comprehensive group exhibition based on the late avant-garde movement that unfolded in the Balkans in the 1920s, and more specifically on its communicative imprint as manifested in the two art magazines "Zenit" and "Tank". The show runs untill the 18. december 2022 at @kongegaarden amd my contribution was generously supported by the @statenskunstfond #tankhiphop #ahistorythatneverwas #Retroavantgarde #sculpture #spraypaint #graffiti #avantgarde #hiphop #alternatehistory (at Kongegaarden) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cl4ciEWssDT/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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3d printed semi transparent spraycans with hydrographic lables In a vintage Yugoslavian Airlines bag from the 90ies. A design inspired by the famous american Krylon spraycans and featuring text by the slovenian constructivist Avgust Černigojs. Including the slogan The Artist Must Become an Engineer / the Engineer Must Become an Artist. Printed in cornstarch based material grown and manufactured in Slovenia. The semi Transparent and ghostly spraycans remnants of a different time line that ours, where the collective and authorless played a more central role than territory and individual authorship. The paradoxical term "retro-avant-garde"  that the show takes its title from was developed by artists working in the late socialist and post-socialist contexts of eastern Europe, Central Europe, and the territories of the ex-Yugoslavia. Today the term is mired in its own cannon of storied avantgarde transgressions, stylistic conventions and has an established place in the art historical cannon. But strategies for reimagining the future by reinterpreting the past remain relevant, especially in times such as the present when the future may seem inevitable and unchangeable. There will always be lost and unwritten histories that can be used to challenge the present narratives of who we are, what will be possible in the future and how we understand the past. Retroavantgarde a comprehensive group exhibition based on the late avant-garde movement that unfolded in the Balkans in the 1920s, and more specifically on its communicative imprint as manifested in the two art magazines "Zenit" and "Tank". The show runs untill the 18. december 2022 at @kongegaarden amd my contribution was generously supported by the @statenskunstfond #tankhiphop #ahistorythatneverwas #Retroavantgarde #sculpture #spraypaint #graffiti #avantgarde #hiphop #alternatehistory (at Kongegaarden) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cly6kN_MlGF/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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At the show Retroavantagarde at kunsthal Kongegaarden in Korsør, Denmark you can find this fragment of a graffiti subculture that never existed . Reminiscent of the kind of fragments of the Berlin wall that became popular souvenirs after the fall of the wall. Just much bigger and closer to the tradition of monochrome painting that belong not to the outlined cannons of graffiti but rather the filled tradition of the historical avantgardes. A hybrid object between histories and aesthetic tradition that I hope might make it possible to reconsider both. This wall fragment is One of six elements in the exhibition is that together form the beginnings of an interdisciplinary multi-year art and research project with the working title Tank Hip Hop. It consists of a fragment of a wall, a Slovenian chair with a sweater, a phone playing Slovenian rap, a bag full of fictitious spray paint cans, a video essay and a vintage Slovenian shelf with a couple of made-up books. Together this assembly forms a fragmented narrative of a hip-hop subculture inspired by the avantgarde that might have been. Retroavantgarde a comprehensive group exhibition based on the late avant-garde movement that unfolded in the Balkans in the 1920s, and more specifically on its communicative imprint as manifested in the two art magazines "Zenit" and "Tank". The show run untill the 18. december 2022 at @kongegaarden amd my contribution was generously supported by the @statenskunstfond #tankhiphop #ahistorythatneverwas #Retroavantgarde #sculpture #spraypaint #graffiti #avantgarde (at Kongegaarden) https://www.instagram.com/p/ClvTjE5sTOs/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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I used to run with a group of Berlin graffiti writers just after the fall of the Berlin wall sometimes in the nineties. An i remember how, when they were low on funds they used to chip, pieces of random grafitti walls in Kreuzberg and sell them to tourist who wanted a piece of the real Berlin wall. I've always enjoyed the though of people of holding on to these "fakes" as a symbol of the German reunification and the so called "end of history". Thinking to myself that perhaps some of these invented historical fragments have by now made it into private collections or museums to become a part of official history. Fragments of the wrong and unimportant walls that can are able to pass for the right and significant kind of wall - "Torjan Horse" fragment, imbued with ambivalent narratives of reunification and complex questions about freedom that did not make it into the mainstream history, that they now serve to illustrate. Many years later when I was thinking about history, selective memory and what is deliberately forgotten i made "A fragment of a subculture that never existed (Tank HipHop)" 2022 for the show Retroavantagarde at @kongegaarden . A sort of enlarged, hybrid version of the Berlin wall fragment and the avantgarde tradition of contourless monochromes. A dislocated and out of context part of the graffiti tradition made into a part of an invented history where the traditions of the Slovenian avantgarde merged with Hip-hop to form a weird local hybrid. A very physical fragment of something that never was, a glimpse of a possible past that connects unconnected histories to imagine new futures. #tankhiphop (at Kongegaarden) https://www.instagram.com/p/CjOSHGZN7UY/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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In her book "Tag Town", Martha Cooper photographed vintage graffiti tags in her Washington Heights neighborhood, still visible from the early 1970's to 1980's (tags are those hard to read scribbles you see on mailboxes and other surfaces around most cities). Many of these tags contained arrows, as well as stars, hearts, numbers, etc. These early tags established complex variations of arrows as part of traditional graffiti letterforms. #tagtown #tankhiphop #kongegaarden #retroavangarde #historyasitmighthavebeen (at Kongegaarden) https://www.instagram.com/p/ChFGu8cD7n9/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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Three 3d printed and hydrodipped facsimile graffiti books on a vintage shelf from slovenian (home made sometime in the 90ies accordingto the guy i boughtit from). One glitchy reproduction of an authoritative graffiti book from the US, a blackbook, or scrapbook, (of the kind graffiti writers used to meticulously glue photographs of their graffiti into) and a fictional biography of the slovenian/yugoslavian artist Avgust Černigoj as a graffiti writer - with the subtitle "constructivist graffiti 1898 - 1982" #tankhiphop #thisisnothistory #workinprogress #parahistory for the show retro avantgarde at @kongegaarden and supported by @statenskunstfond (at Kongegaarden) https://www.instagram.com/p/ChCtICaMeUf/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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A selection of 3d printed arrows before paint and primer for #tankhiphop at @kongegaarden supported by #statenskunstfond (at Copenhagen) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cg2bL-EsvkQ/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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A fragment of a paint covered concrete wall painted by a subculture that could have existed. Before removing the masking tape to reveal a thin layer of concrete covering a Styrofoam core and applying a bit of weathering. An archaeological fragment of a past that never was, reconstructed in the pressent. #tankhiphop #workinprogress #studio #spraycan @kongegaarden https://www.instagram.com/p/CgzB5oOsWwC/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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"The arrow... everybody's got their own arrow, I like that though. Various arrow, some guys had add on letter arrow that was like connection. Some people had different arrows just going right through their pieces." The graffiti writer zephyr said in the 1983 cult classic Style Wars. A hugely influential documentary film on hip hop culture and its American roots. #stylewars #everybodysgottheirownarrow #tankhiphop #3dprinting https://www.instagram.com/p/Cgul2J6Mw0T/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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Asking the #midjourney algorithm to imagine kandinsky painting graffiti on the 80ies subway looks like this #tankhiphop (at New York City, N.Y.) https://www.instagram.com/p/CgptSgVMHOz/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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Slovenia graffiti according to the @midjourney.ai.lab algorithm. Something that never existed in a fairly convincing computer generated version. #tankhiphop https://www.instagram.com/p/CgL7OZaMhFo/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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On the pleasures of German ugly-and-yet=appealing book design and the hope of being able to make my way through this book with my lacking knowledge of German #reasearch #diegeschitedeship-hop #tankhiphop (at Berlin, Germany) https://www.instagram.com/p/CgJeJQ2sIwE/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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When you start working and researching something new, it is often difficult to know weather one is merly becoming sensitive to areas of thought that were always there, or finding people and project responing to the same concerns of thh moment. Case in point this map of the genral german hiphop history that includes large parts of my own history by Moses März at the @berlinbienniale . Perhaps merely a generation and its preoccupations of, say a generation of retired graffiti writters, becoming institutionalised, and their concerns legitimised and theorised. #tankhiphop #reasearch (at Akademie der Künste) https://www.instagram.com/p/CgB8m5Psb20/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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Images from the open source Dall-e mini algorithm that generates images of graffiti from text input, imagining a fictional Slovenian hip-hop subculture. Using the illegible, but still recognisable, computer created imagery to help me move beyond the conventions of graffiti as I was taught it, to imagine local styles of lettering that look like they originated in the 1990ies Europa graffiti scenen, but never that never was. To form the basis of a new handstyle for the ongoing Tank Hiphop project. #retroavantgarde #sloveina #noncomformistart #workinprogress #ThisIsNotHistory #graffiti #slovenianavantgarde #aerosolhistory #statenskunstfond #tankhiphop #dallemini #handstyle https://www.instagram.com/p/CetFQOQM1Rg/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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Images from the open source Dall-e mini algorithm that generates images from text input, imagining a fictional Slovenian hip-hop subculture. Using the glitchy, but no wholly unconvincing, computer created imagery to help me unseat my own ideas, and imagine something that never was. #retroavantgarde #sloveina #noncomformistart #workinprogress #ThisIsNotHistory #graffiti #slovenianavantgarde #aerosolhistory #statenskunstfond #tankhiphop #dallemini (at Kongegaarden) https://www.instagram.com/p/Ceqeg3ssl7N/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=