Daniel Pflumm, Europaischer Hof (still), 2002. Courtesy of Emily Tsingou gallery, London, and Galerie Neu, Berlin.

Daniel Pflumm’s practice is set within the context of the city. In his work he has been exploring mechanisms of western urban life while constructing a vocabulary of major corporate logos, mass media images and techno sound tracks. He suggests a continuum of political and social comments regarding the effects of capitalism. During the ’90s these elements of his work have gained him critical acclaim and have led to his video and lightbox work becoming familiar to a wider art audience. His work has been described as containing both minimal and industrial austerity elements.

Pflumm’s artistic practice can be said to stem from his personal background. After Columbia University in New York he moved and studied at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin — where he is currently based — parallel to the period of the fall of the Berlin Wall Fall and the reformation of the city of Berlin. There, he was involved as a club organiser with two nightclubs in the area of Mitte. Between the period 1992–97 these clubs were providing technical support to video artists and media activists and were experimenting with techno music opposing attitudes to pop culture elements.

These references can be considered as central in the works that were presented in his recent show at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. Three of his older videos where showcased alongside the new London, 2008, as well as two recent ‘logo’ works: a lightbox (Untitled, 2008) and a silkscreen print (Untitled, 2007). In the video Questions and Answers CNN, 1997, some of the slight nodding and eye flickering of TV news hosts have been isolated composing visual loops that are accompanied by witty techno soundtracks. These repetitive elements seem to reflect the newsreel content of major TV stations. Europaischer Hof, 2002, is a collage of advertisement clips that compose a series of sense-stimulating images originating from commercial promotion campaigns. Focusing on flashy colours, shiny materials and smooth fluids the video becomes a trip through a personal image depot that seems to be shared with a broad consuming audience. In Paris, 2004, the cityscape is remapped by flipping between 2D and 3D elements: shots of explosions, riots, skyline and dominant commercial logos that articulate a series of authority comments. These logos have been deconstructed and their typed characters have been removed revealing a negotiation on their geometrical basis. The new film London, 2008, is connected to these stable themes of Pflumm’s work. The city is negotiated through the skyline, traffic, lights, and images of young people drinking in neighbourhoods, rain, white-collar guys and construction work in progress.

The four films seem to construct a consistent total of content and form that comments on reality in an intensive political mode. Throughout the 101 minutes of the repetitive projection the videos create a hypnotising rhythm of visual loops and sounds that compose an efficient pattern. The two logo works that accompany the videos follow the same pattern in an attempt to extend the screening to the gallery space.

The ideas and techniques that are often mentioned as the culture of the ’90s and its typologies have been reproduced in various cases of artists’ practice. The concern in this case would be whether these references are currently being used in the form of productive critical implications regarding contemporary culture, or as simple aesthetical references that are still negotiated and repeated in the same way and with the same intentions as before without suggesting new achievements.

What seems to suggest an interesting contradiction in the case of Pflumm’s recent show, is its hosting space. The gallery is based in East London, an area that is currently undergoing radical and dynamic development due to the Olympic Games. The Whitechapel Gallery, which has been a landmark of a specific part of London’s art scene, is currently almost closed due to a reconstruction and expansion project. One part of the venue temporarily hosts the Whitechapel Laboratory. Moreover, the further context of the, traditionally, alternative East London scene is moving westward, towards mainstream and central gallery spaces, both in literal and metaphorical terms. In this context it might be interesting to reconsider Pflumm’s work as an ambiguous practice whose content deals with the commercialised evolution of the city space refreshing or repeating older conversations and concerns.