FIXTURES #2 - Henning Christiansen Archive / Rachel Dagnall & Thorbjørn Reuter Christiansen on February 24th, 2025
24.02.2025 | Admission: from 6.30pm / Start: 7pm |
Address: Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin | Entry at the side entrance
The event will be held in English.
For the second FIXTURES event on February we have invited Rachel Dagnall and Thorbjørn Reuter Christiansen. They will present a selection of video and sound recordings from the archive of the Danish FLUXUS artist and composer Henning Christiansen (1932-2008) that have just been digitized in the Media Workshop. The video material includes documentation of numerous actions from the period 1969 to 2008, with Joseph Beuys and others and of performances in the 1980s and 90s in Berlin. In addition, excerpts from records produced by the Henning Christiansen Archive (Møn, Denmark) with music by Henning Christiansen are presented.
Henning Christiansen was an artist and composer born in Copenhagen in 1932. From the 1960s until his death in 2008 he created visual art, actions and musical compositions.
At the age of thirty he became part of the Fluxus movement where he worked internationally on collective actions with Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman amongst others. In Denmark he was one of the few members of the Fluxus movement and part of the Experimental School in Copenhagen with his artistic collaborator Bjørn Nørgaard and the painter Per Kirkeby. Henning Christiansen was a Professor of multimedia art at HfBK in Hamburg 1986-97.
The colour green was an important symbolic aspect of his work and he began painting instruments and objects in this colour to represent and replicate the sounds of nature in 1967. The collection of which, formed the basis of his personalised homemade orchestra and visual language, incorporated into musical compositions, actions, performances and art exhibitions.
The archive and selection of documentation is presented by the artists Rachel Dagnall and Henning’s youngest son Thorbjørn Reuter Christiansen who run the Green Ear record shop and archive on the island of Møn in Denmark.
The work they will present and talk about is from documentary footage they are currently digitalising at the Media Workshop.
They have been selecting a few juicy extracts from the footage spanning almost 50 years including some previously unseen footage of Henning Christiansens performances from 1969 and reenactments of his anti-war / anti-wall performances, made in public spaces in Berlin.
The event in the Medienwerkstatt studio was a complete success. Interested guests lined to the corridor to see and hear the lecture by Rachel Dagnall and Thorbjørn Reuter Christiansen. Among them were numerous friends, fellow artists and colleagues of Henning Christiansen, who knew him from joint Fluxus actions, concerts or exhibitions in the past. The versatility of Henning Christiansen's life and artistic work became tangible through the selected digitised video documentations and the played vinyl records in combination with the personal stories told by Thorbjørn Reuter Christiansen.
