MARC BEHRENSNEWSBIOMUSICARTWORKSREADBANDCAMPYOUTUBECONTACT
2023
BBPS Traps
sculptures
BBPS Trap (Green)
(Feedback Lumen Echo, Fenstergalerie Will, Darmstadt, Germany, Kunstansichten: Traps/New Evidence, Atelierhaus B71, Offenbach am Main, Germany)

The sculptural objects BBPS Traps are reminiscent of traditional ghost traps and dream catchers. They are made of bamboo and iridescent plastic floating playfully in space and evoking the bamboo barricades of the democratic protests in Bangkok or Hong Kong. Behrens’ art traps are not about demarcation or obstruction. They are attractive attention-grabbers, strange attractors, and the joy of discovery should get caught up in them.

2022
Five Star Climate Killer Retreat
sculpture
Five Star Climate Killer Retreat
(Frankfurter Sport & Kunst Kasino – Argobay, Jahrhunderthalle Frankfurt am Main, Germany)

The artificial miniature island Five Star Climate Killer Retreat was part of Argobay by Frankfurter Sport & Kunst Kasino, a group exhibition and art & sports parcour in and around a big extinguishing pond. Climate critical materials like polyurethane foam and iridescent, reflective polystyrene sheets, all heat-formed, are built into a floating structure that contains a four-beam fountain. It slowly turns around and back, propelled by the jets’ recoil. Curated by Annette Gloser.

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2021
Imperfect Partners
audiovisual installation
Imperfect Partners
(Kunstkeller des Weinguts Georg Müller Stiftung, Eltville am Rhein, Germany)

The installation deals with the Zasmidium cellare fungus, which is typical for European wine cellars. The sound of wine fermentation, computer controlled percussion, spoken word and video footage of the fungus create a multi-layered artwork. Part of the Klangkunst in Industriekultur program during the Tage der Industriekultur regional showcase. A cooperation by Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain and KulturRegion FrankfurtRheinMain.

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2021
Mask Behrens
solo gallery exhibition
Mask Behrens
(2021: Kunstraum Traube, Mühltal, Germany; 2022: Der Mixer, Frankfurt am Main, Germany)

Masks and performative photographs by Marc Behrens, created by the artist from 2020 to 2021, partly in collaboration with Robert Schittko, Carlo Kurth and Mara Lou Kurth. Funded within the framework of the cultural promotion programme “Hessen kulturell neu eröffnen” by Hessische Kulturstiftung.

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2021/2024
Spiritual Airplanes
ephemeral sculptures in public space
Spiritual Airplanes
(Taunus hillside and Offenbach, Germany; Venice, Italy)

The first six Spiritual Airplanes were sprayed onto the snowed-in landscape of the former Heidetränk oppidum (settlement) in early 2021. They were inspired by the absence of flight traffic and very quickly covered by new snow again. More airplanes were documented in the Offenbach city forest and later in the city centre of Venice in 2024.
2020
Marc Behrens 2009:2019
Marc Behrens ≤2008

hardcover books, 172 and 124 pp.
Marc Behrens 2009:2019
Marc Behrens ≤2008
Hardcover catalogues of Marc Behrens’ art works until 2019, two volumes, 17 x 24 cm, 124 and 172 pages, each volume includes an A2 poster. Made possible by the shareholders of the Marc Behrens Aktiengesellschaft (Marc Behrens Incorporation) and funded within the framework of the cultural promotion programme “Hessen kulturell neu eröffnen” by Hessische Kulturstiftung.

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2019
Zur Fabellehre
installation
Zur Fabellehre
(Osterspaziergang 2019, Willemer-Häuschen, Frankfurt am Main, Germany)

For a replica of the colour circle in Johann Wolfgang von Goethes essay Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours) eggs are injected with coloured ink, contaminated as it were, then cooked, cut in half and displayed on a traditional egg plate. Dyed in the inside, the Easter eggs are part of an installation with historical laboratory stands, birds’ nests and glass flasks mounted on an antique root wood table top, that could be Goethe’s missing chemical laboratory.
2019
Orakel
installation
Orakel
(Osterspaziergang 2019, in the garden of the Willemer-Häuschen, Frankfurt am Main, Germany)

Inspired by the Catalan L’ou com balla (the egg that dances—traditionally displayed during Corpus Christi), a mobile fountain is filled with black water. Visitors can make a prepared water-repellent egg dance on the small water jet. The Orakel (Oracle) communicates through the number of necessary attempts to achieve that, and through the duration and intensity of the dance.
2019
The Cargo Scroll
photographs, digital text, sound
The Cargo Scroll
(part of the solo gallery exhibition Alexa, Cargo, Clould, Orbit24, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, previously published in Wrong Wrong n.6)

A Cargo cult is a religious movement whose followers believed that Europeans had stolen objects from the deceased ancestors and that these would then return them to the living by air. In order to aid that event, simple replicas of landing strips and control towers were constructed. The Cargo cult was mainly active throughout the 20th century in Melanesia.
2018
Ganzfeld-Versuche
experimental audiovisual setup
Ganzfeld-Versuche
(part of the event Alle im All, with Tanja Küchle, Dede Handon, Trevor Paglen’s Orbital Refector, Eva Weingärtner and Marc Behrens, Orbit24, Frankfurt am Main, Germany)

The Ganzfeld (“complete field”) was used in parapsychology and therapeutic research. The Frankfurt experiments followed after a reading of Alles ist in allem und in allem zugleich (Everything is Contained in Everything and in Everything Simultaneously) by Eva Weingärtner and Marc Behrens, which deals with synaesthesy, the circular scale and the drifting between the universe that can be observed and described, and the inner universe.
2018
hyperMOODbox
by Annesley Black, Marc Behrens and Julia Mihály
audiovisual installation
hyperMOODbox
An audiovisual installation by Annesley Black, Marc Behrens and Julia Mihály in the central areas of the main train stations of Frankfurt am Main, Darmstadt and Wiesbaden. This work is part of the Transit culture programme by Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain.
2016
Prophecy 117
video, colour, stereo, 6:12 minutes
Video clip produced for the musical composition Prophecy 117 by @C, taken from the CD album Three-Body Problem (Crónica, Portugal, 2016). With Claudia K. and Hugo N.
2015
Fantastication
solo gallery exhibition
(Fenstergalerie Will, Darmstadt, Germany)

> read more

 

2015
The Religion of Toxins
double mono sound installation
(Museu Serralves, Porto, Portugal; Il Suono in Mostra 2017, Udine, Italy)

The installation was situated in the Serralves chapel’s coro space. The 23 minute composition uses the natural reverberation of the space. The two mono sound sources constitute a kind of elevated audio fusion of recordings at the Festa de São João in Porto and the Thaipusam festival in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia).
2015
noissiM
solo gallery exhibition
(Eschborn K/Galerie K, Eschborn, Germany)

Interrelated photographs from a nine-year period and a few microstories are summarised unter the title noissiM: evidences of a non-linear journey, which is not thoroughly explicable. Aerial images taken while crossing the Andes, photographs of trails into uncertain vegetation, of places and creatures which can awaken hidden sensations and historically encoded memories.

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2015
A Magnet Between Proteins and Sugar
solo gallery exhibition
(Sismógrafo, Porto, Portugal)

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2013
Contraact
installation
(Festival de Arte Sonoro Tsonami 2013, Parque Cultural Valparaiso, Chile)

Tables function as meeting places: conversations take place above their tabletops, drinks are poised on them, contracts are signed, documents slid from one side to another, like on a small stage. When tables and chairs are inactive, they are often stacked, like in a bar that is closed during the day. In Contraact everything that could be placed on table tops is actually held between them, as other tables are stacked on top of each other, upside down. When visitors of the installation in front of the former city prison turn the stacked tables on the connecting axis, they hear squeeching and gnarling sounds.

2011
Recurrent
sound installation
(Paivascapes #1, Paiva river at Espiunca, Arouca, Portugal)

The running waters of the Paiva river are the lifeline for flora and fauna, humans and handicraft, and the supposedly supernatural beings of the region. Sound recordings of all these lifeforms and activities are composed into complex, seemingly repetitive sequences. Like running water that appears uniform, although it never flows in the same way. The compositions are audible through an installation with floating loudspeakers. They blend with the natural sound of the bypassing water masses. Life in all its facettes is given back to the river.

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2010
Apparatus
sound installation
(IMO, Copenhagen, Denmark)

An installation with seven compositions inside a former telephone cabin. One sound layer in the foreground is heard via headphones, a second layer, immersing the visitors via loudspeakers in the ceiling of the cabin as a background. The overall sound originates from the body centered layer that moves with the listener as well as with the outer sound cover inside the soundproof phone cabin. Nearly equal sound events can be heard at times in one or the other layer. Nature recordings overlap with machine sounds, a dedicated microstory can be read on a digital picture frame, sentence by sentence.

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2009
GGAAFFISEC
sound installation
(Weißfrauen Diakoniekirche, Frankfurt am Main, Germany)

From the melody notes of Pentecost hymns no. 124–137 of the German Protestant songbook, the eight most frequent notes are statistically determined for an organ chord: G, A, F, F sharp (Fis in German), E and C. These notes are sustained for two weeks as tuning and sound essence of the reverberant interior space of the church building, and as tonal counterpart to the steady murmur of the traffic surrounding it. Eight keyboards in plastic casing serve for this, sound: Church Organ. They come from a Frankfurt school and were partially labelled by students of a musical education class. The sound of the keyboards, technically constant, comes alive in the perception, as soon as one moves around in the space.

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2009
The Recompiler
object
Original object: multicore audio cable with eight different connectors, steel wire, steel clamp, and cardboard badge. Overall length 46.5 cm.
Edition, featured in the limited version of the album Compilation Works 1996–2005: color photograph, Lambda print, 31.5 x 31.5 cm, edition of 19 copies.

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2008
Cutting Qinghai
colour photographs
Series of photographs shot during a residency in Qinghai Province (Western China) in Summer 2008, witnessing, among other, cheek piercing at the Lurol festival in Tongren.
2008
Unit
sound installation
(Farewell to Post-Colonialism. The Third Guangzhou Triennial, Time Museum/Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China)

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2007
Continuum
installation
(Sleppet, Kunsthall 3.14, Bergen, Norway; Ultima, Oslo, Norway)

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2007
Marc Behrens Aktiengesellschaft, Namensaktie über EURO 100,-
[Marc Behrens Incorporation, Nominal Share of EURO 100,-]
social artwork
Multiple, edition of 100 (a bottle of 0.75 liters 2006 Bacharacher Wolfshöhle Mittelrhein Riesling Spätlese trocken, and a contract in wooden box with branding).

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2005
Entity Mülheim
sound and video installation
(Mülheimer Profile 2005/Mülheim klingt, Kulturbunker Mülheim, Cologne, Germany; 7th annual SOUNDplay Festival, Theatre Centre, Toronto, Canada)

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2004
Of Mouths and Explosions
video, colour, stereo, 12:34
Produced during a residency at Hull Time Based Arts, Hull/UK.
> Press sheet Of Mouths and Explosions english /.pdf 97KB
> Press sheet Of Mouths and Explosions deutsch /.pdf 97KB
2004
Per Ada Sola
video, monochrome colour, stereo, 1:00
released on: «VRNITEV, 112_video_minuti» – double DVD (Stazione di Topolò–Postaja Topolove, IT, 2006)
For the video project VRNITEV, 112_video_minuti (Stazione di Topolò–Postaja Topolove, IT). In memoriam Ada Sola.

> the whole VRNITEV project in streaming
2004
Collateral Generator of Forms chapter 2
video, colour, stereo, 7:41
2003
Frankfurter Regen für den Hermannshof [Frankfurt Rain for the Hermannshof]
object
White umbrella with contact microphones to be plugged into a walkman recorder while walking under the rain, a 3″ audio CD with rain recorded in Frankfurt/D attached to it. Made for an art fundraising at the Hermannshof, Völksen, to help finance a new exhibition building.
Hermannshof Völksen > www.hermannshof.de
Photo: Thomas Langreder
2003
Pioggia di Topolò/ Topolovski Daz /
Rain of Topolò

with Nikolaus Heyduck
sound installation with rain
2003
Foto- und Videoarbeiten
with Stephen Fenton
gallery exhibition
(Galerie Station/Mousonturm, Frankfurt am Main, Germany)
2002
Collateral Generator of Forms chapter 1
video, colour, stereo, 7:07
Commissioned by Lampo/Chicago, USA.
2002
Entity K
sound installation
(Zwei Frankfurter Künstler, Schmuckmanufaktur Kneist, Darmstadt, Germany)
Sound playback controlled by a motion detector accompanying a jewellery exhibition.
2002
Nine Zones
video, colour, silent, 12:31
2002
Summation 0.3
video, colour, stereo, 35:31
Excerpt from Summation 0.3
video, colour, stereo, 3:46
released on: b!as, International Sound Art Exhibition – book + DVD (Et@t, Taiwan, 2005)
Documentary video of installations and performances, older versions:
2001 Summation 0.2
video, colour, stereo, ca. 32:00
1999 Summation 0.1
video, colour, stereo, ca. 28:00
2001–2006
Bulletholes
colour photographs
2001
The Unknown
interactive sound installation
(Sound In Art, Space–Galéria Priestor for Contemporary Arts, Bratislava, Slovak Republic; tenyearsofart, WackerKunst, Mühltal, Germany; Podewil, Berlin, Germany; Correnti Sonore, Centro Europeo Luciano Ceschia, Tarcento/UD, Italy; Electrograph03, Athens, Greece; «Observatori 04», Valencia, Spain; Glück und Konsum, Wiesbaden, Germany; Phantoms, MART Gallery, Dublin, Ireland)

> read more
2000/2005
Tokyo Circle
interactive sound installation
(Sound Art – Sound as Media, ICC InterCommunication Center, Tokyo, Japan; INM-Institut für Neue Medien, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Hörgänge, Hermannshof Völksen, Germany; Galerie t-u-b-e, Munich, Germany; Erlanger Hörkunstfestival, Markgraphentheater, Erlangen, Germany; B!AS Sound Art Exhibition, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan)

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1999–2008
Baumbestand [Tree Population]
colour photographs
1999
Experiment in Scale
sound and video installation
(Projekt: Medusa, Kunst.verladehalle, Rüsselsheim, Germany)

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1999
Keyholes
interactive sound installation
(INM-Institut für Neue Medien, Frankfurt am Main, Germany)

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1998
Entity INM
sound installation
(Salon Vireal, INM-Institut für Neue Medien, Frankfurt am Main, Germany)
Sound recordings of the server room in the institute were processed and played back in shifting layers over a six-channel speaker system distributed over two and a half building floors. A sound entity that overlaps the actual physical space in at least four dimensions.
1998
Projekt za Znojile telefonske kartice [Project for Znojile Telephone Cards] and Komunikazijski instrument za ohranjanje stika z izginulimi [Communication Instrument for Keeping Contact with the Vanished]
installation
(Transverzala Utrinkov, Strzišce, Znojile and Kal, Slovenia)

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1998
L’eco di un’esplosione che non ha mai avuto luogo [The Echo of an Explosion that never Took Place]
sound and film installation
1998
Model for a White Out
installation with sound
(Untereinander Nebeneinander, G-Werk Ost, Frankfurt am Main, Germany)
Two shelves in an industrial shelving system housing a group exhibition, embraced a neon tube. A transparent text print (an excerpt on attack tactics under difficult weather situations) was glued onto the tube. A peep-hole permitted view to some rice grains in motion on the membrane of a hidden speaker, immersed in intense red light. A high static crackling on a second speaker parasited another artist’s sculpture nearby.
1998
Environment
installation with sound
(rraum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany)

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1997
Top Down/Bottom Up
sound installation
(Galerie Fruchtig, Frankfurt am Main, Germany)
Linked to the discovery of the ‹up›/‹down› and ‹top›/‹bottom› quarks, the latter only observed in short-lived matter. Rice grains on the membranes of three bass speakers’ membranes mounted under the planks of a wooden walkway jumped up when sounds occurred on the speakers, affected by wind intensity.
1996
Black Box / Light Box
light and sound installation
(Selektion, Frankfurt am Main, Germany)

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1996
Vienna Installation
with Bernhard Günter
sound installation
(Path. Anat. Bundesmuseum Narrenturm, Vienna, Austria)
A sound installation was implanted into several cells of the circular museum building. A stereo source was distributed to 8 channels and manipulated with long delays to create a sound entity moving through the building.
1996
Circle
performed sound installation
(version 1: B-Movie, Hamburg, Germany, version 1.1: Dampfzentrale, Bern; and Shedhalle, Zürich, Switzerland)

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1995
Merzbow, live July 5th, 1995
video, colour, stereo, ca. 45:00
with Achim Wollscheid
VHS tape (Selektion, D)
The first officially sold video of Japanese Noise band Merzbow.
Achim Wollscheid
Merzbow
1995
Projektionen
performed film installation
(rraum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany)
An event with five super-8 film projectors, one square shaped fluorescent screen and a hemispherical acrylic bowl filled with milk. Film loops were either plain white or night blue. Different reactions were elicited from the lighted materials; the milk, for example seemed to change colour into brown. The illusion was produced by one white frame burning inside a projector. The projectors were wired with contact microphones, and their sound amplified.
1994
Objekte
with Ho. Turner
gallery exhibition
(Galerie Gartners, Frankfurt am Main, Germany)

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1993/1994
Scanning
with Jörg Eberle
performance


(1993 Zwischenfall, Bochum, Germany/1994 Galerie Gartners, Frankfurt am Main, Germany)
A decomposition.
Scanning pt. 1: A sound piece made from recordings of broken glass.
Scanning pt. 2: The scanning of 20 square metres of acoustically amplified glass sheets mounted on small metal pins, thereby fracturing and fragmenting the glass.
Photo below: Andreas Schramm
1993
Source Feedback
video, colour, stereo, 25:12
VHS videotape
private limited edition of 10 copies
Digitally re-edited version for screening 2001.
1992
Transmission
with Eisenherz
performance
(Borsigallee 33, Frankfurt am Main, Germany)
The alchemical process was used for outlining the proportions of the sound passages and different actions during this event.
1992
Cybervisual Variation
video, colour, silent, 14:58
with Torsten Grosch
1992
Trip
video, colour, stereo, 3:58
1992
Visualisation
with Horst Turner
gallery exhibition
(Kunstfabrik Arheilgen, Darmstadt, Germany)
Several objects were shown in this exhibition, including the Film Shredder, a machine shredding exposed 35mm film, equipped with a fan to hurl the film fragments (elements of a décollage) towards the spectator. Thus the light projection is perceived haptically, and the spectator becomes an image carrier—exposed through the fragments hitting her/him.
An edition of 10 film cans filled with shredded 35 mm film was produced.
1992
Slaughterhouse
performed installation
(City Slaughterhouse, Wiesbaden, Germany)
Performance for one actor and one custom-built shredding machine at an event organized for the old part of the Wiesbaden City Slaughterhouse. Initiated by Antoin o’Heocha.
1989
Virgo
performance
(Kunstfabrik Arheilgen, Darmstadt, Germany)
Audio-visual performance about the loss of the American Dream for one actor, one speaker, and one toy robot.

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