Historical records

The photographic ready-made Memory and its use as historiography is a central theme in Dani Gal’s (* 1975) work. Since 2005, the artist has compiled a large archive of historical vinyl records; he combines these sound documents in his installations and performances – often collaborations – with electronically generated sound. He initially deconstructs this historical material, puts it in a contemporary context, and reconstructs in this way – by structuring the previously widely scattered material – a layer of the past that would otherwise remain sensorially irretrievable. He thus stimulates our study of history, opening up a truly surprising additional perspective. Dani Gal examines how history, or rather, how its recording is constructed, packaged, presented and consumed; yet, it is not simply about the individual vinyl record as an aesthetic object, but also all the information related to it. In addition to numerous records on World War II and its protagonists (»Hitler spricht«, Goebbels, Roosevelt, Churchill, etc.), it is, above all, those American records of the post-war period that stand out in his collection: speeches by Kennedy, Nixon, Jesse Jackson and LP-collections with original recordings from 1967, 1968 and following years. This raises questions about historic events and their medial presentation; Dani Gal immediately creates an ironic distance by nebulizing the analogous semantic cosmos of the spoken language with digital-electronic sound clouds he produces. The book at hand not only documents his work based on meticulous research in the labyrinths of media archives, but rather interweaves – in the actual sense of that word – the source material with pop culture and forms something like a photographic ready-made.