Amalie Jakobsen at Gether Contemporary

Artist: Amalie Jakobsen

Exhibition title: Fool’s Gold

Venue: Gether Contemporary, Copenhagen, Denmark

Date: November 22 – December 20, 2019

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Gether Contemporary, Copenhagen

In a split second, gravity has been eliminated. A swarm of stone-like sculptures float with metallic shimmer through-out the exhibition space and sends one in orbit along with the stone rubble.

Amalie Jakobsen creates works with elegant precision that define the exhibition space by creating a carefully organized choreography for our ways of moving and understanding space. In the exhibition Fool’s Gold, the art-ist’s second solo exhibition at Gether Contemporary, the space is revealed anew. The sculptures are abstractions of asteroids, fragmented celestial bodies traveling in their fixed orbit around the stars. Two black rigid geometrical sculptures, which serve as poles in the room suck the stones into orbit. Jakobsen expands our perception of space from the concrete architecture we inhabit daily and pushes outer space into our world view forcing us to confront it.

The universe has always been the object of mankind’s wildest dreams from the pioneering astronomer Tycho Brahe over NASA Apollo missions to near future outer space tourism. Currently, there is a focus on developing mines at asteroid belts near Earth as our planet’s resources are limited and cannot facilitate our constant increasing demand for expansion. This type of asteroid mining is both an expression of a growing technological development that many hope will save us from the climate crisis and simultaneously a run on precious metals which has already cre-ated an extensive pollution crisis in Brazil, China and Malaysia and maybe soon in outer space.

The infinite expanse of outer space, which is not easily accessible, has become a metaphor for infinite potential: the universe can embrace everything, everything that we desire and everything that we can imagine. It is human desire to the highest degree. Jakobsen’s sculptures represent this kind of desire, simultaneously attractive and alienat-ing. The surfaces are akin to advanced typography where uneven bumpy surfaces and disappear into the outlines of an otherworldly landscape. Just as tectonic plates the aluminum has been moved, pushed, collided with other plates. The sculptures are also beautiful and enticing as the pyrite or Fool’s Gold indicates in the exhibition title. The surface shimmers of copper and gold to silver and platinum. Some places the metal is polished and captures its surroundings in its mirror finish, other parts are rough and uneven. They are simultaneously enigmatic, extraterres-trial, and familiar.

The interior of the sculptures are partially exposed through perforations in surface and reveal them as hollow shells that shifts the heaviness and the idea of them removed as fragments of compressed minerals and metals. They are not asteroids in a traditional sense that float around lonely in outpace far from human influence. On the contrary.

They point towards the near future, where the asteroid belts have already been targeted for mining, thereby being dragged into an earthly context.

When a cosmic phenomenon such as asteroids is abstracted out of the infinite into our human time perspective our awareness of the cosmos and earth dependency is highlighted. Our fate is inextricably linked with our globe, where deep time cannot be measured in minutes, hours, days, or weeks but rather stars, galaxies, asteroids and incomprehensible time where the human is merely an invisible parenthesis.

With closer inspection one discovers each sculpture is equipped with a microchip (GPS tracker) the size of a small finger. This small digital instrument stands in stark contrast to the hammered metal sculpture. It is precisely be-cause the production of microchips that metals in outer space are in high demand. Here the microchips can forever track each individual sculpture after the works leave the exhibition. They can be used to map new asteroid belts into collector’s homes, storage, and as part of new exhibitions.

Amalie Jakobsen’s silent asteroid storm in Gether Contemporary’s bright gallery space is far from an attempt to illustrate a human conquering of the wealth of the universe. The sculptures are rather investigation of the physical and bodily labor of crafting as an attempt to understand what the future will bring. In the sculptures, one can sense a frustration over the world’s current condition, that stems from stones hollowed-out interiors as well as the tireless hammering and knocking that has settled into the surface of the sculptures providing their form.

– Nanna Stjernholm

Amalie Jakobsen (b. 1989 in Grenaa, Denmark) lives and works in Copenhagen and Berlin. She graduated from Goldsmiths University of London in 2014. She has exhibited at Neter Proyectos, Mexico City, Galleri Brandstrup, Sta-vanger, Gether Contemporary, Copenhagen, Efrain Lopez Gallery, Chicago, TwilSharp Gallery, Johannesburg, Breve Gallery, Mexico City, Bosse and Baum, London amongst others. Amalie Jakobsen is featured in the 2015 publication Nordic Contemporary, published by Thames & Hudson Ltd. She has recently completed a large public commissions for The New Carlsberg Foundation, Denmark.