EXHIBITION
Group exhibition Rhythm in it: On Rhythm in Contemporary Art
With Aargauer Kunsthaus, Switzerland
2013
Artist: Adam Vackar,
Anri Sala,
Bethan Huws,
Bruce Conner,
Camille Graeser,
Christian Marclay,
Dara Friedman,
David Claerbout,
Ferdinand Hodler,
Gabriel Orozco,
Hans Richter,
Jean Tinguely,
João Maria Gusmão,
John M. Armleder,
Jonathan Monk,
Katja Strunz,
Klara Liden,
Markus Raetz,
Martin Creed,
Max Bill,
Niele Toroni,
Paul Klee,
Pierre Haubensak,
Richard Paul Lohse,
Robert Morris,
Rodney Graham,
Sebastian Hammwöhner,
Sofia Hultén,
Stan Douglas,
Stéphane Dafflon,
Su-Mei Tse,
Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs,
Ugo Rondinone,
Verena Loewensberg
Work Concerto for a Shotgun
2012, music scores, wood, plexiglass box, 130x180x17cm
Concerto for a Shotgun is a poetic and disquieting work that stages a confrontation between creation and destruction, abstraction and violence. In this piece, blank musical scores are perforated by the scatter of shotgun fire—transforming the act of composition into a gesture of rupture. The resulting notations, erratic and uncontrolled, form a series of nine "partitions" displayed in three horizontal rows, recalling the structure of a classical concerto while simultaneously undoing its precision and order.
Presented within a plexiglass vitrine, the installation features a low-tech wooden support that holds the shot-through scores in tight formation, creating a rhythmic, wave-like surface. The work teeters between absurdity and solemnity: an orchestration of randomness born from the collision of culture and violence.
At the heart of Concerto for a Shotgun lies a personal dichotomy. The artist draws from his own family history—between his paternal grandfather, a celebrated Czech classical composer, and his maternal grandfather, a military general who served alongside President Ludvík Svoboda during World War II and later became the head of the presidential military cabinet, yet was soon after dismissed for opposing the Soviet invasion. These parallel legacies—of music and militarism—intersect within the work, collapsing inherited narratives into a single gesture of unresolved tension.
The project is rooted in an ongoing autoethnographic study and archive-building practice, through which the artist seeks to construct a personal methodology for engaging with familial memory, Czech history, and the larger entanglements that shape the Central European cultural and political landscape. Concerto for a Shotgun becomes a tactile meditation on authorship, trauma, and identity, probing how intimate histories echo and complicate the broader geopolitical terrain.
Now part of the Time Capsule Collection in Zurich and private collection in Brussels, the work was exhibited at Adam Vackar‘s solo presentation (Art Statements) at Art Basel artfair and later the Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau, Switzerland. It stands as a meditation on authorship, memory, and the fragile line between aesthetic gesture and real-world trauma.