Installation documentation of gallery two, showing a two channel film projected across two big screens positioned at an angle to each other. The gallery is dark.

Douglas Gordon

k.364

3 July - 07 August 2022

Douglas Gordon is a Scottish artist who creates work that questions the complexities of memory and perception, both from an individual and collective position. This exhibition focused on his major film installation k.364 and marked the premiere of this work in a public gallery in the UK.

A photograph of a two channel film. The image shows a train on a track. The films reflects off the gallery floor.

k.364 features two Israeli musicians of Polish descent (Avri Levitan and Roi Shiloah) traveling to Poland from Berlin by train. Shown on multiple screens and with layered audio, the film follows the two men through a desolate landscape in a country whose tragic and violent history is barely resolved for them.

Gordon films the musicians on this personal journey, isolating intimate moments when their passionate love of music seems to move between them. Leaving Berlin, they first travel through Poznań, home of the celebrated Amadeus Chamber Orchestra. The journey concludes with the musicians’ performance, at the Warsaw Philharmonic concert hall, of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat major (also known as Mozart’s Köchel Composition k.364, from which the title of this piece is derived). This work is an intimate document of the relationship between individuals and the power of music, against the subtly drawn backdrop of a dark and unresolved social history.

This installation occupied the entirety of Gallery 2 at DCA, whilst in Gallery 1 audiences saw a suite of connected works titled Dark Burnt Scores. Partially, and sometimes almost wholly, burnt pages of the violin and viola scores played by Levitan and Shiloah in k.364, are framed against black. Mournful and delicate, they hint at disappearing cultures, lost conversations and destructive forces.

A photograph of an artwork displayed as.a grid of black rectangles.

About the artist

Douglas Gordon (b.1966, Glasgow, Scotland) lives and works in Berlin, Glasgow and Paris. His practice encompasses video and film, installation, sculpture, photography, and text.

Through his work, Gordon investigates human conditions like memory and the passage of time, as well as universal dualities such as life and death, good and evil, right and wrong.

Gordon’s work has been exhibited globally in major solo exhibitions including the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (1999), Tate Liverpool (2000), MOCA in Los Angeles (2001 and 2012), Hayward Gallery in London (2002), National Gallery of Scotland (2006), Museum of Modern Art in New York (2006), Tate Britain in London (2010), Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2013), as well as in Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (2014). His film works have been invited to the Festival de Cannes, Toronto International Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Festival del Film Locarno and New York Film Festival, among many others. Gordon received the 1996 Turner Prize.

Douglas Gordon, k.364, 2011 Video installation. Dimensions variable. 51 min, looped © Studio lost but found / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020