Every Silver Lining’s Got a Touch of Grey

For a magazine concerned first and foremost with ephemeral sonic practices, it’s valuable to also consider and observe cultures and contexts adjacent to such practices. To put it differently: everything has to do with everything, and it seems legitimate to say that “documenting contemporary music and sounds,” as the description of zweikommasieben reads, basically means “documenting the contemporary.” In this endeavor, contemporary visual arts have always been an important component, and the column “Formations” highlights this complicity. As a visual contextualization of any given topic that zweikommasieben investigates, the column remains open in structure and content.

This iteration of the column, curated by zweikommasieben’s photo editor Flavio Karrer, presents a selection of works by Tina Braegger. She is an artist who lives and works in Berlin and Zurich. She deals with questions surrounding originality, reproduction, authenticity, and repetition of imagery. Since 2011 she has been working on an ongoing series of paintings using the motif of a marching bear—the unofficial logo of the iconic American rock band The Grateful Dead. It is less the band’s musical practice that excites Braegger and more of an interest in understanding how the counterfeit symbol explores the tensions and processes of reproduction.

For zweikommasieben, Braegger contributes several images from her archive, showcasing the often fluctuating, mutated, and warped forms that the image of the bear has taken on in her paintings in the last few years. This formal repetition can be seen as both an attempt to trace the image to its original source while also indicating its relevance in the realm of contemporary imagery and reproduction techniques.