Vernissage Betonfelder
On Friday, June 7th we invite you to our vernissage at OKEV Potsdam.
B R U E D E R S E L K E B E T O N F E L D E R
– A Photo Sequence –
Betonfelder – Chamber Music in a Plattenbau
The award-winning East Berlin-born, Potsdam-based, polyinstrumental composer duo Brueder Selke (CEEYS), with Sebastian Selke on cello and his younger brother Daniel Selke on piano, is continuously expanding the repertoire of their two main instruments and, as independent curator, regularly presents bespoke musical happenings such as their annual Q3Ambientfest.
After their debut “The Grunewald Church Session” with their first sketchy childhood fragments, they returned, with the album “Concrete Fields”, to their musical roots “in the real socialism” of East Germany of the 1980s. Already here they had used the first photographs that they took in 2015 together with and under the professional guidance of the photographer Anne Krausz.
Back then, their childhood home, a Plattenbau in the socialist Brutalist style common in GDR times, was examined from all different perspectives. A winding labyrinth, confusing, anonymous, with countless rows of balconies, giant mosaics – and here and there a cat on the windowsill. The pictures were taken by Sebatian with a Zeiss Ikon and by Daniel with a Reflekta II in square and portrait formats. Since then, especially the square-format photos have been used on their album covers and booklets and have formed the visual component of their subsequent releases. “Wænde” is dedicated to their personal feelings surrounding the sudden fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 – the “Wende”, and “Hiddensee” was released as a kind of travel album from the 1990s. The cover of “Hiddensee” shows, for example, the same apartment block from an ambiguous angle and resembles both a dynamic ship’s bow and a mountain to be overcome.
The brothers are currently finalising their “Hausmusik – Notenband 1” and “Notenband 2”. These art and music books are named after the CEEYS album of the same name, which, after the retrospection of “Wænde” and “Hiddensee”, brings us into the present. The books will contain the remaining portrait-format photos.
Since 2020 Sebastian and Daniel have been releasing music as Brueder Selke and also pursuing interdisciplinary projects under their real names. And so it is as Brueder Selke that they present this extraordinary sequence of pictures in its entirety as an exhibition with, fittingly, music and photography.
Their prize-winning short film “Rilke Ueberoffen” with moving still lifes from the Plattenbau of their childhood was itself at first only a small part of a visualisation that encompassed the whole album “Wænde”, and now forms an installation with music within the exhibition.
[Daniel Cole & William Chang]
