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11/9/2003

Thomas Bang

Stalke Galleri, Copenhagen

It is with great pleasure that Stalke Gallery shows Thomas Bang’s first solo gallery exhibition in seven years. The exhibition presents a group of six new installation works along with a series of new drawings, which indicate important aspects of Bang’s development during the last couple of years. In the group of works ”Tales of Frail Conditions” Bang is interested in the object’s encounter with a world of turbulent change, a violent meeting that in various ways has had an effect on the object and left it in a damaged state.

In these works, meaning branches out into infinite layers of complexity and paradox. An element that contributes to this network of meaning is Bang’s strong narrative charging of the objects, partly through the titles of the works, partly through the use of recurrent motifs and themes in the group of works as a whole. The titles, like the objects, are often enigmatic fabulations. They are formulated as abstract questions that incite further reflection, and they generate a process of investigation about the condition of the objects and the signifying elements present in the works. In other words, it is not a case of well-rounded tales with an Aristotelian beginning, middle and ending, but fragments that have to be read against a narrative, causal logic.

The damaged objects in this group of works can be considered as a kind of ”apparatus of orientation”, some with well-known designations such as scarecrows and traps, but all of them with an alien character. There is a large degree of ambiguity surrounding their functionality, or rather instrumentality, which cannot be understood through rationale, the faithful companion of the instrument. What interests Bang in this re-conceptualization of the instrument’s classic logic, is that it makes it possible to see the instrument as more than a means to achieve a goal defined by function, and thereby opens its functionality towards an imaginary world that is in a permanent state of potential transformation.

Stalke Galleri
Vesterbrogade 184 1800 Copenhagen C Denmark

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