The Cosmic Strips - Soundcomics for Roberto Matta
Bring your headphones to the exhibition space! By invitation of the Kunstforum, the writer Natascha Gangl and Rdeča Raketa, the electronic music duo of the composers Maja Osojnik & Matija Schellander, have set a selection of Roberto Matta's paintings into sound.
Matta referred to his pictures as "Cosmic Strips", in which he fused opposites, collided macrocosm and microcosm and created futuristic series of images. Natascha Gangl & Rdeča Raketa now translate selected images further into sound and text, picking up on Matta's acoustic fantasies and his love for language games, manifestos and surreal poetry.
Natascha Gangl, Maja Osojnik und Matija Schellander have been developing audio pieces, live performances, artworks, exhibitions and discourse formats under the title "Klangcomic /Soundcomic" since 2016. Just as word and image merge in comics, spoken word and sound merge here: sound becomes language, language becomes sound. Contemporary composition meets the literary experiment. Styles are eclectically combined, madrigals meets children's book meets techno meets anagram meets hip-hop meets essay – ad infinitum – high culture, pop culture, subculture merge into psychedelic journeys in fields of sound.
The three artists explore the possibilities of transforming images into music and visualizing sound in artworks. They have previously created sound comics for works by Unica Zürn and Anestis Logothetis. In 2018, Maja Osojnik founded the label "MAMKA RECORDS" and has been releasing sound comics on vinyl, art books & prints in small editions.