North Vancouver art exhibit captures historic people and moments through vinyl records

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For about 15 years, Dani Gal collected a specific genre of vinyl records that appeal to both the eyes and ears.

The Berlin-based and Jerusalem-born artist and filmmaker’s first Canadian solo exhibit of commercially produced long-play records documenting global historic moments is on display until July 14 at The Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver.

Gal bought more than 700 vinyl records as part of his ongoing Historical Records project. The exhibit features part one of the project, which is made up of 246 records Gal bought between 2005 to 2018.

Gal became interested in the culture of “sampling” — including an element of someone else’s recording in a composition — over 20 years ago.

“I was starting to get curious as to the whereabouts of those samplings and what else you could find there and recorded material that is not music but speech,” Gal says.

“I started to look around on eBay and second-hand stores and I started to stumble upon this spoken-word genre of records, but specifically the one that covers political events [made] me the most curious.”

He slowly grew his collection that covers the 20th century, realizing historical records were a “vast phenomenon” that disappeared. He looks at the project as a “political soundscape,” with each record covering either one major political event the publisher felt was important to share or a radio station highlighting a series of events or a year in sound, Gal says.

The records form a mosaic on a wall in the gallery’s ground floor. There are records like “Sounds of Marine Corps Boot Camp” from 1960 in the United States and a 1979 one in French of former Canadian prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau speaking about topics like unity and the country’s future.

Others document U.S. civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., former German chancellor Willy Brandt, and Albanian Indian nun Mother Teresa.

“One of the most interesting questions for me in this is thinking about the format of the record, which is very much identified with pop culture, and in a way, personal music consumption. And this idea of replaying sound [and] music at home and asking myself and trying to understand what was the motivation for anyone to play or to replay a record like this at home?” Gal says.

“To me, it’s an interesting moment … where the individual and the collective, in terms of memory culture, in a way integrate or meet.”

The exhibit also features a copy of Gal’s book Historical Records, which includes an interview with him, photography, and an index of the records.

There is also a sound station with two computers and headphones. On one monitor, visitors can browse through 12 radio programs Gal created, while the other leads to the Historical Records website, where people can select records from the collection to listen to.

The gallery’s chief curator Monika Szewczyk, who organized the exhibit, says the listening station allows people to “access the work in multiple ways.”

Szewczyk has a background in art history and gravitates towards artists who delve into the complexity of how history is made. She says the grid of records is a “history painting,” with the exhibit also appealing to the sonic.

“I think in a moment when there’s so much happening, we see historical calamity on various media all the time, and there’s incredible polarization,” Szewczyk says.

“There’s a lot of opinion, there’s not a lot of listening, and it feels like this work really invites you to listen and think deeply about the longer trajectories. History is not the news, history is a much longer trajectory.”

Gal opened the exhibit on March 9 with a performance of “Semi-Automatic: The Swamp in June,” an abstract, improvised sound composition made up of different sources, including live radio and samples from the Historical Records collection.

Although Gal cannot know what they experience when seeing the exhibit, he hopes visitors understand and learn about this phenomenon of records and the history they do not know.

For more information about the exhibit, visit https://bit.ly/4cYFyt9.