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20/9/2012

Two exhibitions

Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde

Gudrun Hasle: Overruling Pain

OVERRULING PAIN at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde is Gudrun Hasle’s first solo show in a Danish museum. It revolves around themes of blood, desire, and pain: Pain from a foreign source, self-inflicted pain, and diversion of pain.
Gudrun Hasle researches mechanisms of human assimilation to mainstream culture. She gets up close and digs in deep. In OVERRULING PAIN we are invited into a darker realm of contemporary existence. We get a rare insight into the individual’s painful adaptations of normality and negotiations of identity.

You must be beautiful, smart, and considerate. You should be independent. You should be happy. You should be perfect. These are high expectations and can be difficult to meet. Not being able to live up to all of them may foster frustration and a sensation of failure. For some people these feelings are so hard to handle that they withdraw from the world and seek refuge in a secretive, private place, where frustrations and rage can be acted out within a controlled environment instead of taking it out on others in violence and rampage. In the secluded space or parallel reality the struggle is to the death. The struggle can be imagined as a world of vampires or can be a very real fight against the Self and the body it inhabits. In this case the fight is taboo and the weapons of choice are knifes, razor blades, and other lethal tools.

In OVERRULING PAIN a large mix of different media is on display, from various archival matter and prints, to linocuts and embroidery. The bloody theme of the private life-struggle represented by various anecdotes and found objects is transformed in Gudrun Hasles vision. The intimate perspective is expanded into a struggle for blood in the guise of popular culture’s recurring fascination with vampires.
The Tween- and Teen-infatuation with vampires are often disregarded as a vent for early sexual imagination: The Un-deads’ desire for human blood fills us with sweet horror. The vampire tales cover the underlying dread with a sheen of fantasy and sensitization. But Gudrun Hasle’s artistic frankness relentlessly forces us to see the raw reality underneath. When young people cut themselves or harm themselves in other ways, deeper psychological conflicts are revealed than mere sexual development.
The brutality of self-inflicted pain and vampire tales meet in the exhibited art works. Linocuts and needlepoints alike are born out of violent acts of cutting and perforation, thus repeating the act of self-harm. From piercing skin to piercing linoleum Gudrun Hasle works through trauma and alienation.
Gudrun Hasle (b. 1979) graduated from the Funen Art Academy in 2008 and is of a new generation of young artists, who take their point of departure in radical subjectivity, where to question the Self is central to the artistic process. The exhibition OVERRULING PAIN (in danish: MODSMERTE) is a further extension of Hasles explorations of personal experiences and visualization of inner life.

The exhibition is supported by the Danish Arts Council.

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Jørgen Michaelsen: Yummy Rooms for Robespierre

The new installation by Danish artist Jørgen Michaelsens, Yummy Rooms for Robespierre, produced for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde, seeks to stimulate both our mental curiosity and our bodily sensibility. As such it defines a critico-aesthetic space. With regards to its form and content the interrelatedness between its disparate parts is based on meticulous considerations and calculations. The beholder will be able to discern forms, figures, and patterns of meaning that trace the dynamics between sound and text, objects and images. It is central to the installation that the perceptual faculties are challenged. Each individual must embrace the complex constellations of textual and aesthetic material to decipher the work.

We are met by an abundance of various components such as video, collages, gouaches, booklets with drawings and haiku poems, as well as the primary text “Beyond Exception”. “Beyond Exception” is found as a booklet and encountered as a monumental presence on the wall, differentiating perception while exploring the span of anthropomorphic relativity.

The installation occupies the first floor of the museum, partly as a chromatic experience. In the two small chambers every wall has a different color whereas the main space is divided by a bunker-like construction, playing on both color and light: The room is partly illuminated by unbecoming neon and partly by the lurid glow of an old, incandescent bulb. In the museum’s cinema videos of various
length emphasize the intense interconnection between speak and sound. The accumulation of material offers several different points of departure and hence innumerable possibilities for a singular experience.

But what of the title? What has Robespierre to do with the installation by Jørgen Michaelsen?

Maximilien Robespierre was one of the central political figures for the French Revolution, 1789 - 94. In the eyes of posterity he is best remembered as the bloodthirsty tyrant who ordered the execution of thousands of fellow citizens. They were beheaded on the guillotine for greater or lesser sins against the republic. But Robespierre could also be remembered as the incorruptible Jacobin idealist whose desire for order and lack of pragmatic will was irreconcilable with the historical necessity. It was neither the right time nor the right place for his uncompromising ethos. In the end, the powerful politician fell himself victim to the play for power. He paid with his life.

The exhibition as such is not an illustration of a certain historical development. Rather, Robespierre must be seen as a certain mode of representation, a sign, or an impulse, which triggers a series of associations unfolding various perspectives for critico-aesthetic considerations. In this sense, Yummy Rooms for Robespierre creates an experimental synthesis of interrelated themes, balancing, counterbalancing, and morphing into one another as forms as well as carriers of possible meaning in a network of arguments. At the same time Yummy Rooms for Robespierre can be seen as a framework for argument. The questions that the installation gives rise to have to do with the role of the historical conscious and unconscious today in politics, in aesthetics, and more generally: What is the relation between aesthetic experience and critical thought? What is political imagination? How does an ideological backdrop inform definitions of truth, justice, pleasure, and desire? How can matters of individuality and collectivity be experienced and described? What is the difference between society and the State? And maybe most importantly: Is it possible to produce and perceive of an Art with the overarching goal to problematize the idea of aesthetic autonomy in contemporary artistic practice within the critical framework of political ideology?

Jørgen Michaelsen is a Danish artist of the late 1980s generation who specializes in a certain theoretical conceptualism, concerned with the underlying mechanisms of the construction of history, narratives, and reality, with aesthetics as the pivotal point. He graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1994 and has since participated in exhibitions both in Denmark and abroad. In 2005 he received the Eckersberg Medal – a Danish honorary medal for artistic excellence.

For more information on the artist, visit his website http://www.jorgenmichaelsen.net/

The exhibition is supported by the Danish Arts Council. Further funding by Grosserer L.F. Foght’s Fund

Image: Gudrun Hasle: Mapping, 2012. Embroidery, blue cottonthread on canvas. Detail.

For more information please contact:
Curatorial Assistant: Laura Ifversen, lauraif@samtidskunst.dk, tlf. (+45) 46 31 65 80

Opening: Friday September 21, 2012, 5 – 7 pm

Museum of Contemporary Art
Staendertorvet 3A, DK-4000 Roskilde
Opening hours: Tuesday-Friday 11am-5pm, Saturday and Sunday 12am-4pm
Entrance fee: Adults 40 DKK. Seniors 20 DKK. Children, Youth, Students & Members FREE
Guided tours (in danish): Sundays at 2 pm, free after paid admission
Special Event: Artist talk as guided tour on Sunday, September 30 at 2 pm.

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