"Niklas Goldbach’s video installation "On Spirals" is a reenactment of one of the icons of early film installations by Dan Graham. Filmed on an empty lot somewhere in New York City in 1970, “Two Correlated Rotations” was produced by Graham and one of his assistants. Each equipped with a Super8 film-camera the two man span around each other in circles filming their respective partner. The piece was to be presented as a double screening in which each film showed the making of the other (see an installation shot HERE).
Meanwhile Graham’s work dealt with the relation between the human body in general, the space and its limits, Goldbach’s interpretation questions the autonomy of the art work and the role of the artist. It’s less the body than the ego of the artist which occupies the center of Goldbach’s new production as thru digital manipulation it seems as if the artist is filming himself, spinning in endless circles around himself and trying to catch his own features and secrets. But it is not only the protagonist that changed: Graham recorded his performance on an urban demolition site in New York, Goldbach’s chose one of Berlin’s most posh areas buildings that like no other reveals the junction between art and financial market: the Deutsche (Bank)-Guggenheim building on Unter den Linden. The yard where Goldbach’s performance takes place was recently covered with a glass roof and presents in its typical glass and steel architecture a corporate style that ostentatiously shows off a cool presumption pretending that there is nothing precarious."
Text: Julia Draganovic

Camera: Alex Large
Assistance: Viktor Neumann, Steffen Zarutzki
Filmed with support of Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin