Lazy Gramophones Artists pages

Presentation by Anita Volk concerning Henrik Aeshna's 2012 exhibition ( Henrik Aeshna SchizoPoP Manifesto - Tantrik Alchemy of Daily Life ), Pigalle, Paris

Henrik Aeshna’s voice is that of a nomadic poet, 'agent provocateur' explorer of unheard-of zones, spinner of kaleidoscopes and intravenous visual deliriums. His works have drawn compliments from such names as Jean-Jacques Lebel, Jean-Jacques Pauvert, Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth) and Lou Reed.

Unclassifiable multidisciplinary creator, polyglot translator, co-conspirator of Paris-based outlaw art-poetry network Tsunami bOOKS and organizer of Cabaret Toxique, Aeshna injects into European landscapes the pulsation of American experimental poets from the Beat-Noise-Post-Punk-Free Jazz scenes. He is engaged in a radical dialogue with the masters of disorder and ecstasy from faraway tribal cultures (especially after his many experiences with Ayahuasca in South America, years ago), with Experimental Cinema, Butoh, women writers, art brut, photography, long lost bohemias and radical underground avant-gardes, and whatever interesting, disturbing, taboo-defying, rule-breaking and grassroots/magma-infused grabs his attention (without attaching to any reproductions and clichés).

Like a dervish punk maelstrom-machine, he carnavandalizes/cannibalizes the floating butterfly-fragments and debris from mass media, and mixes it all up with splinters of his own journals (“the debris of our lives”) and other objets-trouvés, objets-volés, - an exercise of assemblage he’s been practicing since his adolescence - he was sent to a reform school by then, after being diagnosed with schizophrenia. From this cannibal mélange there breaks through a direct, original and raw poetry which he often calls SHAMANOISE, mother lode of SCHIZOPoP MANIFESTO, an attitude mischievously described by an art curator as "the hybrid rebel grandson of Dada-Surrealism and son of Fluxus and Punk-Situationism, but who decided to defy his parents and escape from home for they've become predictable intellectual totalitarians, unbearably boring, blasé and bureaucratic— but not before burning the house down".