Angst at Tønder Art Museum

Artists: Xavier Cha, Jeannette Ehlers, Miriam Kongstad, Sandra Mujinga, Niels Pugholm, SIGNA

Exhibition title: Angst

Curated by: Rune Finseth

Venue: Tønder Art Museum, Tønder, Denmark

Date: May 23 – October 23, 2022

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and ©Jacob Friis-Holm Nielsen; ©Erich Goldmann

The exhibition explores the apprehensions of contemporary life through the notion of the concept of angst. A term popularized by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55) in his very influential text Begrebet Angest (‘The Concept of Anxiety’), which later had an important impact on the ideas of Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Angst refers to a deep-seated condition of dread in the modern subject; fear without a direct object, it is inherently atmospheric and existential, connected to, but ultimately distinct from, pathologized mental states.

A new immersive installation by the Danish-Austrian art collective SIGNA produces an uncanny and mysterious borderland within the museum; a room filled with veiled brides and countless beds indicating an evacuation center or some other kind of transient space. Congolese-Norwegian artist Sandra Mujinga (b. 1989) explores in her video installation the therapeutic effect of the Norwegian fjords in an age of angst.

“Don’t touch my hair!” The Danish artist Jeannette Ehlers (b. 1973) has created an oversized globe of synthetic afro hair that confronts the viewer with their own anxiety and obsession with the unknown. Angst is often experienced viscerally through the body, and in fact, psychosomatic symptoms are often the only tangible way that angst is physically expressed. The body as knowledge center is explored in Miriam Kongstad’s (b. 1991) installation The Onset of Fever, which is further explored with the sound piece Kimære, developed and adapted for Tønder Art Museum.

Many of the most important episodes in human history have been deciphered from pottery, not unlike the ones on display in Niels Pugholm’s (b. 1983) COVID Potts. For his commission for Angst, Pugholm returns to this ancient medium to make sense of the last two years of human crisis caused by COVID-19: a detrimental viral pandemic that wreaked havoc across the world, causing death, fear, and general hardship. Who are we in a digital world? The American artist Xavier Cha (b. 1980) explores representations of emotions and the sometimes troubling and alienating effect of extending our body to the virtual.

Bringing together artworks from the past centuries in a transhistorical display, the exhibition investigates the brooding aesthetics and morphologies of angst, and argues for the usefulness of this term in representing the contemporary navigation of a crumbling world.