Jakob Brugge at C.C.C.

Artist: Jakob Brugge

Exhibition title: Team Player

Venue: C.C.C., Copenhagen, Denmark

Date: October 6 – November 16, 2023

Photography: Brian Kure / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and C.C.C. Copenhagen

It’s considered a goal in some sports for the individual player to shrink – to recede from the vaulted position of discrete competitor – to fall in line in service of the team. It’s both a tactic on the field and a psychological strategy. In order to contribute to the greater good, relinquish yourself to the group. Buy in and you will be rewarded.

In some ways these works touch on that – it’s one of the promises of the uniform after all – conformity, collaboration, and collective fantasy. They deal with the permission structures that reveal themselves when belonging replaces personal agency. With the ways in which new patterns of behavior become available when ownership over one’s actions is relinquished. These can be subtle, covert, or even comical acts, but can also be a green light for violence.

In the simplest sense the works are depictions of uniformed roles. They are figures that share a single body, their borders having collapsed into a hollow baggy mass. It’s a forward facing configuration whose shared values have somehow resulted in a single unit – bonding taken to its logical conclusion. Multiple personalities joined at the hip on the verge of becoming reliefs. History and myth has been replaced by pattern and repetition and regularity – re-re- enactment. It’s a lot of limbs to not be marching.