nearly all types of honey crystallize presents the works of 11 artists from the Binational Artistic PhD Program at the HfK Bremen.* It documents a series of artist residencies at the GAK project space in 2023, during which the respective artists presented and discussed parts of their artistic research in the form of installations, process presentations, discussions, lectures, performances and concerts. The current exhibition and accompanying symposium centre on the relationship between experimental artistic work and its documentation. The focus is on those processes in which selected elements are brought to light and others are made to disappear.

The documentary, or practice of documentation, involves a linking of techniques and strategies that make facts visible, audible and tangible. These techniques and strategies, in turn, are not neutral, but are rather shaped and determined by various institutions, discourses, and practices. As such, documentary sources and the act of documenting itself raise questions about what exactly is being recorded, how and which procedures are being used, and what logics of power are reflected in those processes. The exhibition presents work that shows, reiterates, and performs how acts of authentication and testimony, of registration and protocolization, manifest in the respective artistic research practices.

Works by these artists reveal conditions, investigate rules of documentable credibility, and unsettle or undermine the declared evidence of that which has been documented. For this reason, nearly all types of honey crystallize asks less about what a document is, than how something becomes a document. It explores the tension between artistic and documentary modes – in terms of the works themselves, but also in relation to social and political processes, where documenting has become a taken-for-granted, almost inflationary practice.

Victor Artiga Rodriguez’s work explores the cycles in which water moves on earth, through our bodies and from body to body. A score presented as a floor piece invites activation, while video and sound recordings from his residency at GAK suggest a potential vocabulary.

Harm Coordes is concerned with the question of which processes or objects elude our appreciation because of their mundane or everyday character. His installation of textile objects, tools, devices and brief narratives or episodes can be read as both documentation and an instruction manual.

Icaro López de Mesa Moyano has built an electronic instrument that, when made to vibrate, allows a composition of light and sound to be played. Like most electronic devices, its core is a grain of gold, and the conditions under which this gold was extracted from the earth form the basis of the work. Activating the instrument requires a complex programming code, a normally invisible process that is made public here.

Elburuz Fidan’s practice examines the plasticity of memory and archives. Taking Sarah Ahmed’s concept of ’queer use’ as a point of departure, he looks at the ways in which pre-existing materials, fragments and marginalised objects can be reconnected and reworked.

Repetition and automated movement are the central concepts in the work and re-search of Irena Kukrić. The artist investigates the relationship between affect, humans and technology by means of a continuous, machine-like performance wherein each movement is also a documentation of the previous one.

Joosten Mueller investigates the communication of scientific knowledge through objects and models, and how the latter age, become obsolete, fall silent and disappear. At the same time, he investigates ways of bringing them back to life as historical artefacts. Mueller has stored his residency in the form of sound and images on a transparent LP, the contents of which are played on a pair of devices.

Henrik Nieratschker’s work is concerned with the social, political and cultural meanings of labour and how these are changing as a result of technological advances such as digitalisation and automation. His current artistic investigation centres on the black flag as a historical symbol of the workers’ movement. His experimental approach blurs the lines between documentation and fiction in search of alternative narratives.

Dawoon Park works with symbolic processes as well. Her practice explores iconicity, i.e. the correspondence between a word and what it denotes, and the performativity of Korean mimetic words. These operate in a similar way to onomatopoeia, although the former imitate sensations, appearances or movements as opposed to sounds. Contained within these word-gesture hybrids is a certain knowledge of the body, which Park brings to light in a new way.

Christine Rafflenbeul uses experimental bobbin lacemaking to explore processes of thinking through making. In bobbin lacemaking, threads are twisted, crossed, joined and intertwined to create a lace cloth. Rafflenbeul experiments with the artisanal joining and crossing of threads as a means of exploring aesthetic thought modes and making them visible.

Christián Rosales Fonseca’s electro-acoustic compositions reflect on the ethical issues raised by the sound recordings of indigenous Kogui communities in Colombia made by the German ethnologist Konrad Th. Preuss at the beginning of the 20th century. What sacred knowledge was recorded that should not have been disclosed, what is the role of resistance and tactics of concealment, and who owns the rights to the recordings?

Luiz Zanotello’s artistic research centres on the unbridgeable gap between language and the world in a post-colonial present. During the residency, he experimented with techniques designed to transmit the voice and its visualisation through light from the other side of the Weser to the GAK. Zanotello’s work for the exhibition expands a fragment of the performative event into a polyphonic installation.

* The HfK Bremen has been running an art- and science-based PhD program since 2020. This type of artistic doctorate involves the artistic exploration of a topic and its accompanying theoretical reflection. Both areas coexist in a continuous, mutually influential process that is designed to last four years. Artistic research undertaken is directed towards the production and investigation of aesthetic forms of knowledge at the interfaces between disciplines.