Richard Sides

Don't Blow it in the Vector

August 24 – October 12 2014

Richard Sides (b. 1985, lives and works in London) is known for his sprawling and playful multimedia installations. On the occasion of his first show in Switzerland, Sides addresses the genre of documentary. He started a filmic research and visited four makers of contemporary electronic music. Centre stage of Don’t Blow it in the Vector, the title of the new work and the show at Kunsthalle, are Theo Burt from York, Roc Jiménez de Cisneros from Barcelona, Mark Fell from Rotherham and Lorenzo Senni from Milan; they all are music producers, DJs, artists, musicians and composers.
With an attitude typical for the artist Don’t Blow it in the Vector unfolds into all three exhibition spaces, acoustically and spatially. The film itself is a wild montage of musical samples, conversations with the four protagonists and insights into their everyday life. It reveals an experimental universe that feeds the hedonistic techno club scene but is far away from its glamour; instead it is a world full of digital algorithms and references unknown to the normal music consumer. For non-professionals it may be hard to follow the details of the conversations yet it becomes clear, that also in this specialised discourse, the same questions as in all other areas of artistic production are crucial: It is about cultural idiosyncrasies that determine the adoption of music; it is about tradition and convention, and it is about the relation between construction, emotion and expression.
Don’t Blow it in the Vector is about a very specific topic, but the result of Sides’ artistic investigation is much more than just a comment on it. The final installation is highly allusive, full of content and colour; it is trashy and elegant at once, sometimes disturbing and sometimes mesmerising.

Oliver Kielmayer