Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay: Lyric

The focus of the exhibition included an installation of the same name; the first designs for the installation were created in 2003, during a residency at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen. Lyric is a video performance based on a sung narrative in the form of a five-channel video installation. Stereotypical fragments from thousands of internationally-known love songs were excerpted, arranged and sung according to categorical principles, as a new series of hybrid, theme-based songs.The artist’s marathon-like vocal performance questioned hegemonic concepts of love and human relationships as well as their effect as induced by the mass consumption of pop music. At the same time, the work also evokes a sense of human perseverance, of a physicality that registers physical exhaustion after the prolonged singing and the mass-consumption of pop music.

The project was accompanied by an edition, a Libretto containing all of the song texts from Lyric.