Kunsthal Aarhus BBC

01.01.2021–31.12.2021

Mira Winding, Maiken Stæhr, Sophie Nys, Eliyah Mesayer, Nicole Wemers, Mads Gamdrup, Ayşe Erkmen, Jana Euler, Esben Weile Kjær, Benoît Platéus, Oscar Yran, Rasmus Myrup

The iconography of Oscar Iran’s works draws on art history, conspiracy theories and critical observations of Western-centric worldviews .

In his work Castrated Uranus for BBC, Oscar Yran juxtaposes white marble and rainbow-colored epoxy putty in a sculptural interpretation of the genealogy of the gods as told in the Theogony by the ancient Greek poet Hesiod.

The creation story relates how the god Cronus’ castrated his father, Uranus, and how the blood from the severed testicles later forms the rainbow and helps create Aphrodite, goddess of love. In the myth, power and violence begets love, emphasising the human complexities that apply at all times. Inspired by Greek mythology, Castrated Uranus questions our historical frame of reference and its contemporary relevance.

The complexity is reflected in the work’s integration of marble as a historical, culturally charged and valuable material as a contrast to epoxy putty – a contemporary, kitsch and toxic material. The specific use of both materials in the mailbox urges reflection on their historical and present-day implications.

Oscar Yran (b. 1990, NO) is a graduate of the Funen Art Academy and has exhibited at the National Gallery of Denmark, the Prague National Gallery and Vejle Kunstmuseum.

Benoît Platéus (b. 1972, BE) explores the boundaries of digital and analogue technologies . In Platéus’s practice, such probing of technology finds expression by challenging the idea of ‘the original’ and of unique meanings. Platéus takes objects in their ‘natural state’ and proceeds to distort them, enlarge them, or turn them upside down or inside out.

With Cool-Headed Gloves at Kunsthal Aarhus BBC, Platéus exhibits one of the tools of his trade – specifically one of two canvas gloves he has previously used while painting. The other glove is in a corresponding exhibition space in Kunsthal Aarhus’ satellite department at the Art Sonje Center in Seoul.
As an object, the glove is a double rather than an identical copy of its counterpart.

The traces of the artist’s work embed themselves in the texture of the gloves. By exhibiting a glove in each city, Platéus breaks with the original duality of the gloves, displacing them in time and space.
When placed in the BBC mailbox, the lone glove can no longer be defined solely as a work tool. Rather, the glove takes on multifaceted functions depending on the gaze cast on it: it can be a painter’s palette, a painted sculpture, a piece of cotton cloth, or a canvas that can be stretched onto a hand or turned inside out. The indeterminate object invites an associative, playful approach to form and meaning and how they are mutually entangled.

Benoît Platéus (b. 1972, BE) lives and works in Brussels.

In his contribution to Kunsthal Aarhus BBC, Esben Weile Kjær exhibits a series of letters addressed to Julian Luxford: a spinoff character from the tale of Robin Hood who is obsessed with all that glitters while also trying to figure out how his existence can be more than just an image.

Letters to Julian Luxford is part of a larger narrative. A narrative that unfolds on different platforms and in different guises, as if creating a Hollywood alter ego for Esben himself.

Visitors are free to rifle through the letters to Luxford. The letters add a written dimension to Julian Luxford’s visual, fleeting appearances at, among other things, art fairs, department store façades, in fashion magazines and in merchandise collections in fashion stores. With their physical presence and status as written artefacts, the letters constitute an attempt to establish contact with Julian Luxford outside the representational sphere of images. The attempt fails. The accumulated missives clearly show Luxford to be an absent recipient.

The letters are accompanied by a piece of jewellery made of solid silver set with a few emeralds, designed in collaboration with jewellery designer Vibe Harlsøf. Visitors are invited to try out the piece, which is worn on the outermost joints of the fingers. While inhibiting hand movement, the piece also has sharp knives that may potentially destroy the letters in the mailbox.

In recent years, Esben Weile Kjær (1992) has distinguished himself as a prominent, innovative and experimental artist working in several genres. Incorporating architectural approaches, installation art, sound, light shows, sculptures, textiles, mirrors, video and performance, Esben Weile Kjær scrutinises his own generation and its narratives of freedom, aesthetics, hierarchies, authorities, gender, youth and popular culture.

For Kunsthal Aarhus BBC, Jana Euler (b. 1982 DE) exhibits the sculptural work The Perspective of the Sender . As you open the door, you come face to face with a small human figure, one arm outstretched in front of it while the other props up the rest of its body. The sculpture comes with a flashlight to examine it closer.

The Perspective of the Sender is a sculptural rendering of a subject also found in Euler’s painting Under This Perspective from 2015.

Here, Euler refers to the central perspective of the Renaissance. A simulation and illusion of reality arranged according to the spatial perception of the human eye. Objects appear smaller when they are further away in the pictorial space.
In her painting as well as with the figure in the post box, Euler
turns this principle around as she aligns the perspective to an unknown counterpart behind the wall or in case of the sculpture, the sender of the postbox.

Through reversing the conventional perspective, the human body and the viewer’s perspective of it become distorted.

What is furthest away appear the biggest, and the hand reaching out to the viewer is the smallest. The sculpture demonstrates a failed attempt of contact. The body is neither under the visual control of the viewer nor the physical control of itself.

Jana Euler lives and works in Frankfurt. She is a graduate of the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main.

Ayşe Erkmen (b. 1949, TR) often creates ambiguous spaces by intertwining life and art and by taking her starting point in scenes, objects and situations from everyday life, intervening in and transforming them .

For Kunsthal Aarhus BBC, Erkmen highlights and agitates the function originally served by the exhibition venue, that of a P.O. box. The artist exhibits envelopes which once contained personal letters sent to the artist over the past year. Who sent these letters to Ayşe, and what did they say? What secrets have lain hidden between the fading folds of paper?

Unlike digital email, physical letters call out to be touched and handled, but here such intimacy is reserved for the artist herself. Although the envelopes are exposed to the viewer’s gaze, they are located behind their own plexiglass seal inside the P.O. box. Erkmen makes the inaccessible visible and leaves it that way.

In his practice, Mads Gamdrup (b. 1967) examines the photographic media and its possibilities and limitations. In previous works, he has sought out colour changes in nature and throughout the course of a day and night. Through photography, he has captured such changes in glimpses that are almost imperceptible, yet can still be experienced by us as viewers.

In his work for Kunsthal Aarhus BBC, Mads Gamdrup has looked to previous photographic techniques: in Complementary, he has printed photographs of colours directly onto glass plates and mirrors. A total of six pieces of glass and three pieces of mirror occupies the space of the mailbox.

The work is based on a study of relationships. In visual contexts, what does it mean that someone or something enters into a relationship? And in what ways can communication unfold in this context?

With Complementary, Mads Gamdrup also addresses our psychological perception and experience of the interplay of colours, whether these are complementary or simply different.

In her practice, Nicole Wermers examines the surfaces and structural role of design to discuss how we perceive and explore urban spaces and their social, cultural and economic impact and influence on their surroundings. For Kunsthal Aarhus BBC, Nicole Wermers has created two acrylic photo cubes—their height just fitting into the lock-up boxes—containing close-up shots by the artist of holes in trousers, with the wearer’s knees poking out. Taken of young adults of all genders, each side of the cubes displays a different, near life-size, single knee, surrounded by irregular, roundish holes in the fabric.

Deliberate ripping or artificially accelerated heavy use of trousers is commonly the cause of such holes, a fashion seen in urban highstreets since the late 1960s. Back then, ripping holes into your trousers was a way for various subcultures to reference working class garments and individualize their clothes. By the 1990s, the gesture was a prefabricated mainstream fashion staple: something to consume rather than live.

The social rituals of public space and the role of soft materials such as textiles in negotiating the private and public sphere is something Wermers has been concerned with in previous works such as the Untitled Chairs (2015-2019) and the Vertical Awnings (2016) sculptures.

For her Kunsthal Aarhus BBC contribution, Wermers explores the intimate moment of opening a ‘private’ locker in the public realm as well as the utility and formal character of standardized public holes.

Through video, photographs, words, performances and installations, Eliyah Mesayer (b. 1987) connects his personal stories with mystical and historical figures from Islamic and especially Bedouin culture, folk tales and history. In addition to his poetic works, Mesayer also creates more overtly political pieces that address issues of state, alienation and belonging, as well as the powerlessness associated with being stateless.

The exhibition Wait in line. Wait your turn. Admit one. Free ride to a new nation at Kunsthal Aarhus BBC is an extension of Mesayer’ Illiyeen project. Illiyeen is a nation for the stateless, for the elect and those who want to be citizens there. The state is being slowly built in Mesayer’s artistic project.
For the 2020 Degree Show at the Jutland Art Academy, Mesayer created the postal service of Illiyeen, complete with stamps and uniforms, thereby creating one of the first infrastructural elements of the fictitious state.
The exhibition at Kunsthal Aarhus BBC is a two-part installation comprising two rolls of tickets; one stamped with queue numbers, the other with tickets of admission. These tickets bear the stamp ‘Illiyeen حلم † (dream)’.

In the artist’s own words:

Wait in line, wait your turn.
For centuries we have endured, imprinting the word "sabr" on to our skin, patience is no
longer a virtue but a weapon used by the oppressive systems that dig up every seed a
family of no nation plants. Now how long must we wait.
Take a ticket with you home as a reminder of all of whose who still wait their turn.
Illiyeen حلم†( dream ) is a reminder of the patience, the sabr, the wait. One ticket at the time
one life at the time, remember us, remember these times.
Admit one, free ride to a new nation.
Leave no loved soul behind. seek no more, and wait till dawn,
For this is a reminder that, there are no more seeds to plant in the dark soil of a lost realm.
Take a ticket with you home, as a reminder that change is on the horizon. Admit one,
your free ride to The Illiyeen حلم†dream, and a new nation.

Sophie Nys (b. 1974, BE) uses sculpture, photography, installation art, video and text in her subtly humorous, whimsical explorations of philosophical, historical, political and artistic issues . In her practice, Nys investigates how sculptural objects, shapes and elements from everyday life can blend into their surroundings, thereby challenging these surroundings and asking them questions while at the same time remaining utterly present in the here and now. Sophie Nys develops her own idiosyncratic rules (for example by playing around with words, titles and forms) for what a work of art is, how it is defined and presented. By applying refreshing, humorous and poetic twists, Nys creates her own space and her own methods defining how we perceive a work of art, an object and a space.

For Kunsthal Aarhus BBC, Nys has created a multiple: 300 editions of a do-it-yourself work that visitors can take home with them. Nys has long been interested in black voids, blackness, and the visible invisible in works of art history such as Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du monde The Origin of the World. With this work, Nys will combine this interest with questioning the qualities and potentials of painting. At Kunsthal Aarhus BBC, visitors will be able to take home a piece of canvas. By following the accompanying instructions, you can to tie the canvas into a knot, giving it a butterfly-like character, and create and intimate and inaccesible spot within the knot.

Voila! In this way, Kunsthal Aarhus BBC visitors can bring home a bit of obscure Sophie Nys blackness.

Maiken Stæhr (b. 1992) works in a field where sculpture, movement and performance intersect, combining performative experiments with sculptural interventions . The results are often poised somewhere between scenography and installation art. Stæhr stages performers in scenarios where the utility value and function of bodies, actions and objects are all fluid and negotiable. The works reflect a keen curiosity in the face of a society full of hierarchical gazes and an avid focus on productivity and efficiency. Stæhr’s practice emphasises how mood and atmosphere can be used as vehicles for the often subtle and humorous narrative processes of the works.

For Kunsthal Aarhus BBC, Maiken Stæhr has created the exhibition Poetic Logistics, featuring three figures – The Horse, the Person and the Vase – moving mesmerizingly amidst a microcosm cast in plaster. Moving in a mechanical choreography lit by two street lamps, dancing around issues such as exchanges, content and distribution in relation to artistic production and interaction.⁠

Maiken Stæhr graduated from the Jutland Art Academy 2019.

Mira Winding (b. 1992) takes a conceptual approach to art, working with sculptural and found objects, photographs, performances and texts.

At her solo show All my boyfriends are soldiers at Kunsthal Aarhus BBC, Winding presents photographs of sculptures taken in public spaces and museums. Intimate portraits of sculptures – whole or as fragments – that represent human bodies, cast in bronze or carved in marble. They form a photographic series with no single, overarching narrative.

In her works, Winding alternates between black deadpan comedy and incisive observations of fragments from everyday life. She transforms these reflections into absurd, hyper-realistic and complex works that show the many facets of reality. Winding works like an open-minded chameleon, sampling images from urban spaces, the world of advertising and the ephemeral realm of the Internet.

Whether in words, images or performances, Winding often uses a form of collage technique in which found elements connect with constructed ones, where intimate, private spaces overlap the public, and so on.