NO SHOW MUSEUM

103.1 (title variable),  2012.

2nd | A

103.1 (title variable), 2012. Custom-made antenna (260 x 15 x 15 cm), 1 watt broadcaster (117 x 60 x 60 cm), sound mixer, loudspeakers, reel-to-reel player, radio (104 x 48.5 x 17 cm), custom pedestal. An edition of 3 (2 signed).

The sound piece consists of an accumulation of silent pauses from important political, intellectual, and economic speeches from the beginning of voice recording to the present day. The work was inspired by a short story, "Murke's Collected Silences" (1955), written by one of Germany's foremost writers of the 20th century, Heinrich Böll. Presented as a radio transmission from a reel-to-reel tape player, 103.1 (title variable) highlights editing as a creative process, but also brings forward Kurant's interest in phantom art, as Böll's story revolves around a sound editor who makes a recording of silent pauses.

Map of Phantom Islands, 2011.

2nd | A

Thermochromic print on paper, 100 x 70 cm.

Map of Phantom Islands is a map of the world. With only fictional islands marked, all other continents were removed, thus creating a map of imaginary territories where colonial influences and power relations can also easily be shown. The maps depict all the phantom islands that during the history of civilization were ever shown on maps of the world as a result of cartographic errors, misconceptions about the world, rumors, myth, and legends, or Fata Morganas and mirages observed in different places around the globe. Some phantom islands were also intentional errors made by explorers who tried to persuade governments to provide money for conquering new lands by inventing and placing some nonexistent territories on maps; these inventions continued to appear on other maps over the centuries. All these islands gradually disappeared from maps over time, as cartography improved, though some islands continued to appear as late as 1943, with others still occasionally reappearing to this day. Bermeja, for example, is a tiny phantom island that the United States still places on manipulated versions of Google Earth maps, perhaps as a potential source of conflict with Mexico, since the island is supposed to have oil resources.

Phantom Library, 2011-ongoing.

2nd | A

Embossed canvas, silkscreen on paper and cardboard, thermochromic pigment on paper, gold leaf, silver leaf, offset print on paper, custom shelf. 

The Phantom Library takes up imaginary books included in novels by authors like Philip K. Dick, Roberto Bolaño and Jorge Luis Borges. Some are mentioned in passing, others more fully fleshed out. Kurant turns these specters of the literary canon into real, marketable goods, creating physical books, each of which has an ISBN number and bar code, but flip through them and there’s nothing – just blank pages. Kurant uses established information about each book to create a book jacket summary and manufactures each book using a mass printer, making each work not so much a precious sculpture as a mass produced, marketable good.

For the second stage of the project, Kurant has enlisted real authors to actually physically write the imaginary books. "I'm interested in this idea of thinking of works as living organisms that have certain agency and autonomy. After they are created there is some kind of transformation, and freeing themselves from their authors – there is a loss of control over the works," said Kurant. Though they may not be completed for years, the imagined books will eventually sell at local bookstores with all the regular, non-fiction novels, retroactively giving material shape to the book-shaped ideas created in the minds of Borges et al. years ago.

Future Anterior, 2008.

2nd | A

Thermochromic ink silkscreen on newsprint, 8 framed pages, 57 x 37.5 cm (each image), 73.3 x 37.5 cm (each frame), edition of 3 (2 signed).

A version of The New York Times from the year 2020. A professional clairvoyant who collaborates regularly with Interpol, police, and governments, and who is a reliable source of information for businessmen and politicians, was asked to create a forecast of what will happen in and around 2020. The forecasts were later developed into an issue of The New York Times with articles written by several NY Times journalists and other ghostwriters. The newspaper has all the specs of The New York Times, from a bar code to advertisements bought by existing companies. It is, however, printed with disappearing ink, which becomes completely invisible above 18 degrees and comes back to black only when it is cooled down. As a result, the newspaper appears and disappears depending on weather conditions and the temperature of the room, or when touched by human hands, which warm up the paper.

Cutaways, 2013.

2nd | A

HD digital film, duration: 23 minutes 40 seconds. Video still. 

In Cutaways, Kurant switches gears from literature to film, placing attention on work, characters and credits that never make it to the screen. In collaboration with renowned film editor Walter Murch, who worked on Apocalypse Now and The Godfather, Kurant created a short film with characters who had been completely erased from noted films. The short stars Charlotte Rampling, Abe Vigoda and Dick Miller, who had been once cut out of Vanishing Point, The Conversation and Pulp Fiction, respectively. For instance, Kurant's vision gave Vigoda, now 92 years old, the opportunity to revive his character from Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 film.