Artist: Andreas Knag-Danielsen
Exhibition title: Welcome to B3IG3
Venue: Museum Anna Nordlander, Skellefteå, Sweden
Date: November 16, 2019 – March 15, 2020
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Museum Anna Nordlander, Skellefteå
Welcome to B3IG3
by Jennifer Chan
Escape into Scandinavian luxury with artist-decorated hotel suites in B3IG3, a city-hopping series of one-night installations by artist-turned-flight attendant, Andreas Knag-Danielsen.
Offering private walkthroughs as a drag host, Knag-Danielsen presents up-and-coming European talent in hotel rooms. The suite is his gallery; the elevator is his runway. Ding! Welcome cyborg wannabee’s TECH2000, PROTEINA, MOIST, CLICKBAIT and HIGH DEFINITION!
B3IG3 is where the party begins, where ANYBODY gets to feel like they’re SOMEBODY.
Check in at our B3IG3 guest table. Strike a pose against ceremonial chiffon curtains. Meander over a two-thousand euro rug while wearing iridescent shoe covers. Breathe in lightly fragranced indoor scent while admiring the most contemporary art. Discover your inner B3IG3.
(It’s pronounced “beige”, by the way.)
The exhibition “Welcome to B3IG3!” by Andreas Knag-Danielsen l takes you into the world of his latest project, B3IG3. B3IG3 is a performative and curatorial platform that invites an artist to utilize a hotel room as an exhibition space and to work with its specific context. Knag-Danielsen is the host and the context for the occasion: he performs real life avatars based on his enjoyment of drag aesthetics, queer alienation and the meeting between the digital and physical world. Guiding an audience from the lobby up to a hotel room exhibition, the experience is celebratory and odd: a tech-conference-turned-queer-fashion-show.
Throughout his practice, Knag-Danielsen explores his ongoing hate-love relationship to technology and its pathological repercussions in relation to his identity and psyche. Mirroring our growing dependency on apps and social media, Knag-Danielsen has been using his performances and its materials to accumulate physical works of art as a part of this project. Photos of all the characters, customized outfits based on previous art works, wearable textiles and video documentation from previous events will be put together for the first time since he started this project in 2018, forming an elaborate installation at Museum Anna Nordlander. In continuance with the exhibition’s theme, Jennifer Chan has created a travel catalogue that introduces all the characters of the B3IG3 “army”. Welcome to B3IG3!
Andreas Knag-Danielsen (b. 1983, Bergen, Norway) works with different media with a focus on the digital realm, performance and objects. His work deals with the interrelation between the human body and technology and is often driven by an exploration of systems and patterns, converting digital technology into the physical world. The resulting works are often reflections about identity, representation and abstraction in relation to the human body where he uses his own queer body as a starting point.
Selected exhibitions: Ekko – Festival for electronic music & art (Bergen, NO), Høstutstillingen 2016 (The Autumn Exhibition 2016), Kunstnernes Hus (Oslo, NO), Galleri Maskinen (Umeå, SE), NOoSPHERE ARTS (NYC, USA), Bildmuseet (Umeå, SE), Malmö Konsthall (Malmö, SE), Verdens Ende Kunstforening (Tjøme, NO), SIM gallery (Reykjavík, IS), Galleri Pictura (Lund, SE), Fotografiska (Stockholm, SE) and he has performed at Galleri Verkligheten (Umeå, SE), Galleri 2 (Lofoten, NO) and at Performance Art Bergen 2013 (NO) in addition to performing at all previous B3IG3 events taken Since 2011 he has been collaborating with Arngrímur Borgþórsson as the artist duo knaggi.com. Knag-Danielsen also works as a curator. During 2015-2017 he worked for the artist-run gallery gallericc.se in Malmö (SE). In 2018 he started the performative and curatorial project b3ig3.com
