Zapp Magazine (1993–1997) was an Amsterdam based international art magazine in the form of a video tape. Sold in shops or mailed out to subscribers, it contained works of video art by a veritable who’s who of the artworld, plus many special clips and features. The freedom it offered people to zapp with their remote controls through what were essentially video art exhibitions in their own homes, profoundly disrupted the traditional presentation of video art, and is one of the many reasons Zapp is so legendary.

Buzzer Reeves has recreated a semi-domestic setting, reminiscing the original Zapp viewers’ experience within which one can binge watch all 12 seasons of Zapp Magazine. One of the beautiful things about Zapp is it was made by insiders who were part of the same social scene as the artists themselves. Dinners, afterparties and show build-ups were recorded unselfconsciously and the result captured a unique view into what it was like to be a successful young artist or budding gallerist in the 1990’s.

The volumes of Zapp along with the hours of previously unpublished raw footage, stand today as a precious and unrivalled historical record of a vibrant time that unwittingly has become distinguished as the last and final pre-internet era.

Zapp produced #11 VHS magazines between 1993 to 1997 and in 2007 a final DVD edition. Each video box featured an artist commissioned cover: #0 Kathe Burkhart, November 1993, #1 Lily van der Stokker, March 1994, #2 Elise Tak, July 1994, #3 Marijke van Warmerdam, October 1994, #4 Barbara Visser, April 1995, #5 Rita Ackermann, Summer 1995, #6 Lothar Hempel, December 1995, #7 Miltos Manetas, March 1996, #8 Mariko Mori, Summer 1996, #9 Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, March 1997, #10 Tobias Rehberger, October 1997, #11 Daragh Reeves, 2007 (DVD)*

*The exhibition features original cover design prototype sketches for the 2007 volume, and site specific interventions in homage of Zapp Magazine.

A few months ago, Thomas crammed a surgical camera into his throat. The resultant photographs are strangely charming — free of the gagging sensation that he pushed through in order to make them. One such image opens this show. In it, a pair of tiny feet appear in deep perspective between glistening teeth. The little picture is spiked with body horror. In low-fi form, it touches the spookiness of how Big Tech places surreptitiously inside of us. Together, flesh and camera become material for a sculpture made from body, technology and image, about the way we’re encased by ourselves, and the secrets that those encasements hold.

In this exhibition’s central work the site of sculpture is extended to cars, video surveillance, architecture, and gruesome histories of empire. Eight monitors show the respective viewpoints of as many dash cams, attached to a single car. As if through the fragmented vision of a gigantic spider we see the passing city in a dark evening light. Before long the car travels a winding path up and down the garage’s ramp which, owing to the building’s cylindrical form, is shaped like an enormous corkscrew. On the monitors, the car’s coruscating route becomes a tumbling and twisting film noir mosaic. The un-pictured driver is a void inside the image.

Thomas came across the parking garage several months ago on a stroll through Brussels. Called the Rotonde Castellini, its architecture was built 150 years ago as part of a grand project to reanimate history, by way of a 360 degree panoramic painting by Charles Castellani. Prior to the advent of cinema such panoramas suffused the modernising European consciousness with memories of military victory and colonial conquest. This particular panorama showed first the Battle of Waterloo, where Napoleon I suffered his final defeat, and then the Anglo-Zulu War, in which the British Empire conquered South Africa.

By 1924, with cinemas spreading through Europe, Castellani’s panorama had become redundant. It was thereupon converted to a parking garage. While the panorama drove singular visions of history into Belgian minds, Thomas’s eight videos show Belgian minds and eyeballs returning to the pre-cinematic propaganda device, albeit under the banal auspices of motor-propelled city life. In this bathetic mise-en-abyme, one technology of all-seeing vision twirls within the obsolete carcass of another.

Text: Mitch Speed

Mail
daragh@buzzerreeves.com

Instagram
@buzzerreeves

Installation view

Zapp Magazine (1993–1997) was an Amsterdam based international art magazine in the form of a video tape. Sold in shops or mailed out to subscribers, it contained works of video art by a veritable who’s who of the artworld, plus many special clips and features. The freedom it offered people to zapp with their remote controls through what were essentially video art exhibitions in their own homes, profoundly disrupted the traditional presentation of video art, and is one of the many reasons Zapp is so legendary.

Buzzer Reeves has recreated a semi-domestic setting, reminiscing the original Zapp viewers’ experience within which one can binge watch all 12 seasons of Zapp Magazine. One of the beautiful things about Zapp is it was made by insiders who were part of the same social scene as the artists themselves. Dinners, afterparties and show build-ups were recorded unselfconsciously and the result captured a unique view into what it was like to be a successful young artist or budding gallerist in the 1990’s.

The volumes of Zapp along with the hours of previously unpublished raw footage, stand today as a precious and unrivalled historical record of a vibrant time that unwittingly has become distinguished as the last and final pre-internet era.

Zapp produced #11 VHS magazines between 1993 to 1997 and in 2007 a final DVD edition. Each video box featured an artist commissioned cover: #0 Kathe Burkhart, November 1993, #1 Lily van der Stokker, March 1994, #2 Elise Tak, July 1994, #3 Marijke van Warmerdam, October 1994, #4 Barbara Visser, April 1995, #5 Rita Ackermann, Summer 1995, #6 Lothar Hempel, December 1995, #7 Miltos Manetas, March 1996, #8 Mariko Mori, Summer 1996, #9 Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, March 1997, #10 Tobias Rehberger, October 1997, #11 Daragh Reeves, 2007 (DVD)*

*The exhibition features original cover design prototype sketches for the 2007 volume, and site specific interventions in homage of Zapp Magazine.

Installation view

Installation view

Daragh Reeves, sketches for Zapp Magazine, 2007

Daragh Reeves, sketches for Zapp Magazine, 2007

Zapp Magazine #11, May 2007, Cover: Daragh Reeves

Installation view

Installation view

Installation view

Zapp Magazine #0, November 1993, Cover: Kathe Burkhart

Zapp Magazine #1, March 1994, Cover: Lily van der Stokker

Zapp Magazine #2, July 1994, Cover: Elise Tak

Zapp Magazine #3, October 1994, Cover: Marijke van Warmerdam

Zapp Magazine #4, April 1995, Cover: Barbara Visser

Zapp Magazine #5, Summer 1995, Cover: Rita Ackermann

Zapp Magazine #6, December 1995, Cover: Lothar Hempel

Zapp Magazine #7, March 1996, Cover: Miltos Manetas

Zapp Magazine #8, Summer 1996, Cover: Mariko Mori

Zapp Magazine #9, March 1997, Cover: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

Zapp Magazine #10, October 1997, Cover: Tobias Rehberger

Installation view

Installation view

Exhibition poster

Installation view

A few months ago, Thomas crammed a surgical camera into his throat. The resultant photographs are strangely charming — free of the gagging sensation that he pushed through in order to make them. One such image opens this show. In it, a pair of tiny feet appear in deep perspective between glistening teeth. The little picture is spiked with body horror. In low-fi form, it touches the spookiness of how Big Tech places surreptitiously inside of us. Together, flesh and camera become material for a sculpture made from body, technology and image, about the way we’re encased by ourselves, and the secrets that those encasements hold.

In this exhibition’s central work the site of sculpture is extended to cars, video surveillance, architecture, and gruesome histories of empire. Eight monitors show the respective viewpoints of as many dash cams, attached to a single car. As if through the fragmented vision of a gigantic spider we see the passing city in a dark evening light. Before long the car travels a winding path up and down the garage’s ramp which, owing to the building’s cylindrical form, is shaped like an enormous corkscrew. On the monitors, the car’s coruscating route becomes a tumbling and twisting film noir mosaic. The un-pictured driver is a void inside the image.

Thomas came across the parking garage several months ago on a stroll through Brussels. Called the Rotonde Castellini, its architecture was built 150 years ago as part of a grand project to reanimate history, by way of a 360 degree panoramic painting by Charles Castellani. Prior to the advent of cinema such panoramas suffused the modernising European consciousness with memories of military victory and colonial conquest. This particular panorama showed first the Battle of Waterloo, where Napoleon I suffered his final defeat, and then the Anglo-Zulu War, in which the British Empire conquered South Africa.

By 1924, with cinemas spreading through Europe, Castellani’s panorama had become redundant. It was thereupon converted to a parking garage. While the panorama drove singular visions of history into Belgian minds, Thomas’s eight videos show Belgian minds and eyeballs returning to the pre-cinematic propaganda device, albeit under the banal auspices of motor-propelled city life. In this bathetic mise-en-abyme, one technology of all-seeing vision twirls within the obsolete carcass of another.

Text: Mitch Speed

Installation view

Installation view

Installation view

Portrait, 2023, C-Print in aluminium frame, passe-partout, museum glass, 14.8 × 14.8 × 2.5 cm

Installation view

Installation view

Installation view

Panorama Parking (detail), 2023, 8 screen video installation with sound, looped, 3:15 min (16:10)

Four Lights (detail), 2023, Corrugated cardboard, plastic, lee filter, LED spotlights, Dimensions variable

Four Lights (detail), 2023, Corrugated cardboard, plastic, lee filter, LED spotlights, Dimensions variable

20 Times (detail), 2023, Aluminium, Dimensions variable

20 Times (detail), 2023, Aluminium, Dimensions variable

Installation view

20 Times (detail), 2023, Aluminium, Dimensions variable

Installation view

Installation view

Program

Installation view

Installation view

Installation view

Sailors of the Land
Group exhibition
14–18 September 2022

Keren Cytter, Shana Moulton, Alexandre Estrela, Thomas Swinkels, Susan Conte, Henrik Strömberg, Morgan Betz, Sarah Rosengarten, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Takahiro Kudo, Mathieu Gargam, Julien Bismuth

Installation view

Installation view

Installation view

Sarah Rosengarten, MIM Mineral Museum 1, 2022, C-print, 59 × 83 cm

Thomas Swinkels, ‘Love’, 2022, C-print in artist’s frame, 14.5 × 14.5 cm, Edition of 30

Morgan Betz, Mets, 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 130 × 197 cm

Mathieu Gargam, Fétuque (fescue), 2022, Plaster cast of 35 mm slides in the wet sand of the beach of Bréhec, France at sunset as the pink full moon rose on the horizon of a summer’s day, 2022, 13 × 20 cm

Shana Moulton, Undiscovered Drawer, 2013, HD digital video, 9:19 min

Thomas Swinkels, safe #7, 2022, Safe, 35 × 25 × 25 cm

Thomas Swinkels, safe #8, 2022, Safe, 32.5 × 32.5 × 17 cm

Takahiro Kudo, Untitled (Homo Nest Raided, Queen Bees Are Stinging Mad), 2022, Sun tanned newspaper, wood, metal chain, 62 × 45 cm

Thomas Swinkels, Dark & Stormy, 2022