For the exhibition Multiple Choices, All of The
Above at Oslo Kunstforening, Danger Museum collaborates with the
band Fortune Cookie on an LP record project. Fortune Cookie produces the
music while Danger Museum develops a collage work for the album
cover.
The project initiated a photographic and musical
exploration trip to Brasil in 2007. It draws inspiration from the
country’s impact in the world community over the centuries, through
trade, such as of sugar, gold and coffee. These were commodities that
particularely fed into the social fabric of Europe. Today Brasilian
music continues this process of cultural pollonation, affecting trends
across the world. The Korean electronic pop duo Fortune Cookie (Boram
Hong and Heejong Yoo) exapmlifies this, mixing their own electronica pop
and Korean folk influences with bossa-nova and other Latin American
music forms. For the LP, Fortune Cookie works with sounds from Brasilian
natural areas, street life and beaches as well as recordings of
Brasilian musicians.
Danger Museum has previously interpreted
album cover artwork. In An Clar Glas (The Grey Album) they
re-staged Peter Blake’s Beatles Sgt Pepper Cover as part of a residency
that explored the relationship between an arts centre and its audience.
Their interest in popular imagery and design has also been directed
towards antique pictorial wallpapers, which they have used as structures
for new images. While these wallpapers were essentially designed to form
an architectual ambience, they also offer a pictorial space with its own
logic, wherein Danger Museum’s fascination lies. During a residency with
Wysingarts in Cambridge the group recreated large scale a 19th century
panoramic wallpaper, a style traditionally used to juxtapose several
famous - often colonial events - in the same panoramic view. The
panorama became the backdrop for a three dimmensional tableau with
objects from some of Cambridge University Museums: religious artifacts,
ancient artworks, craft items and bone specimens - placed in an
altogether new context.
For the forthcoming album cover Danger Museum
uses the so called “box” wallpaper style to collage together photographs
from Rio, Ihla Grande and Salvador. The cover will be a fold-out poster
of in all nine square panels, linked together with decoratively painted
jungle vegetation: The top of a tree in one panel forms the grass in
another and so on.
The LP is presented in a play-it-yourself
listening table designed by the Swedish artist Markus Degerman.
