/ May 29th - June 27th 2010
| The exhibition Party and Lost expresses the nebulous but hopeful ideals of four artist groups. |
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Hesselholdt & Mejlvang, Randi & Katrine, Bank & Rau and Ingen Frygt have wished to dissolve the ego in ecstatic cohesion, working together as one, as no one, and as one self. Together they have created an exhibition for Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art about being a single bacteria in the cosmic stomach - about being brought up to believe in solidarity, but not being educated as to how.
Can the relation between artist-ego and collective striving function as a model for the challenges of any group? Is the collectively executed artwork closer to life? Or does this, the single group member’s renunciation of self, only result in a collective and self-sufficient social-ego? Is any artist group, intentionally or not, an artwork in itself - a laboratory for social relations?
This is how the group itself describes the project: "In Party and Lost agendas and perceptions are tried combined into something almost physical, and then transformed to actual art production. In a number of large installations and monuments we give shape to our helpless dreams and insisting nightmares of the collective. The result is something more complex, but at the same time less complicated, freed of the idiosyncrasies of the single group member. It is disturbing and soothing, it looks cool and it bleeds."
Party and Lost is the last of three exhibitions focusing on the collective, artist roles and idea of community that Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art is showing in the spring 2010. Seen from a historical and contemporary perspective Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art wishes to contribute to the discussion on the relevance of collectivism in the 21st. century and at the same time uphold and rethink, what an artist community is, and what it can accomplish.
BANK & RAU is a group consisting of two artists Lone Bank & Tanja Rau. They work on the borderlines of the art territory, where art meets other fields. Traditionally art is freed of practical value, and should as such not be used for anything, but for Bank & Rau it has shown important to juxtapose the art to the utilitarian world we live in, and a unifying principle in their work, is the work of the hand and the working collective. The works of the group has a strain of folklore and often connects the practical with the esoteric. Bank & Rau is placed in a kind of avant-garde slipstream, where the artist (group) has a wish to recreate the world, with its things and life, recreate it in their own image, to become a free human being in a free world, by setting aside tradition and trough changing the appearance of all human made things. Bank & Rau has organized Art Parades in the streets, sumptuous eatable installations, Theatre Performance, tea towels and table cloths, furniture, mobiles, reliefs, mosaics, sculptures, paintings and much more. In their art they have a great appetite for investigating new kinds of material, which again calls for other techniques than the known, and therefore is capable of describing new conditions, and they end up with a work that surrounds the viewer through its tactile presence. Sometimes in defined art spaces, sometimes outside.
INGEN FRYGT (WITH NO FEAR) is the name of the collective consciousness of the artists Anna María Helgadóttir, Hannah Heilmann and Sigrun Gúdbrandsdóttir. What began in 2001 as an art group of three have gradually densified into an autonomous and uncontrolled fourth persona. Ingen Frygt make affecting pop art with the objective of exploring and describing the logics of power and postures of the self, calling forth images of it’s survival strategies. The work is based on a melt of cultural clichés and personal experiences – the production taking place as a constant visual mirroring of the earth-bound and phantasmagoria, in shifting juxtapositions of physical objects and concepts. One key motif is exoticism as a medium for guilt but also longing. Eating money is another consistent obsession through which Ingen Frygt seeks to describe power structures in society as they unfold in the lives of individuals. A third is how the anchoring of Freudian thinking in the western worlds conceptions of self have become both a common sense notion of sorts and a spiritual escape, an unspoken superstition with complex implications of moral-ethics. Thus the representation of self and a vocabulary of ambivalent symbols always reoccur in this schizophrenic expressionism, a ”politics of emotions”.
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SOFIE HESSELHOLDT & VIBEKE MEJLVANG has worked together since 1999. They graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2006. Their works revolve around a committed and often critical addressing of the reality that surrounds us – sociocultural, political and psychological issues as well as race and gender questions. But far from a dogmatic form it is a complex and elaborating investigation, where the artwork opens for dialogue with its environment.
By imploding fragments from the visual culture of everyday life into new, revealing and often humorous constellations, Hesselholdt & Mejlvang comment on Western values. The duo works in various medias such as sculpture, ceramics and installations, with works or exhibitions that often have an almost physically integrating effect on the viewer. Hesselholdt & Mejlvang are represented by V1 Gallery, Copenhagen and Charlotte Fogh Contemporary, Aarhus, Denmark.
RANDI & KATRINE works with sculptural objects, architectures and images in the borderland between the natural and the manmade. The homely interior, the house, the home, the retreat, not to mention the puzzling similarities and convergences between the bourgeois theatre, cruise liners, shopping arcades and the superficial world of the theme park are recurrent thematic references in their work. They simultaneously widening and disturb the mechanisms by which these manmade and often prefabricated in-between worlds create orientation and meaning in our everyday lives. By means of objects, images and spaces that resist the reassuring, spontaneous categorizations of the outside world Randi & Katrine manage to develop the everyday fictions into the odd and surreal. They build up a series of universes that neither have a clear source, nor a recipient; universes, that constantly shift appearance. To occupy Randi & Katrine’s installations as a spectator - and to let oneself be taken over by them - does not only mean to surrender oneself to a closely orchestrated sequence, which will most likely upset what we expect of a given space, but also to be given the freedom and the opportunity to build and narrate oneself. That chance ought to be seized. Otherwise others will do it for us.
  
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