“The world was on fire and no one could save me but you”. So begins the iconic pop song – quietly and dramatically
– that saturates this exhibition. The song is Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist’s version of the melancholic 1989 love ballad Wicked Game by Chris Isaak. While Isaak croons steadily and maintains the tension on the beach in the original music video, Rist takes it a step further – into the water – in her more desperate interpretation in the now equally iconic 1996 video installation Sip My Ocean.
The unruliness of the ocean and of love – or, let’s just say, emotional life altogether – has been linked at least since antiquity, when Venus, the goddess of love in Western mythology, was famously born from the sea. In Pipilotti Rist’s work, we move up and down through the surface of the water – the symbolically and psychologically charged membrane between visible and invisible terrain. The video is filmed in relatively shallow water, but emotionally, it takes us into the deep end. “No, IIIIIII DON’T WANNA FALL IN LOVE!!!” The chorus of the song is structured as a classic ‘call and response’, in which the choir’s reply is repeated like a mantra: “This world is only gonna break your heart”. Heartbreaking. However, as the desperation increases through Rist’s reworking of the poppy readymade, it tips into a caricature of itself and becomes comical, only to end abruptly with the song’s tragically devastating final line: “Nobody loves no one…” The end. And then it starts all over again, in an endless loop.
When Pipilotti Rist created the work in 1996, she was reportedly not entirely sure whether a video installation of this kind would qualify as visual art, and whether she should consider herself a visual artist. When Maiken Bent encountered the work a few years later, it became the immediate inspiration for her to become an artist herself as soon as possible! In this exhibition, the two artists are brought together in a charged space and an intimate dialogue, grounded in that pivotal encounter and in the sea as an infinite mirror and reservoir for our existential questions.
In Sip My Ocean, two identical video sequences are mirrored in a corner, creating the effect of a colourful Rorschach plate in motion. Mirroring is also a fundamental principle and leitmotif in the exhibition’s three new works by Maiken Bent, all of which are based on familiar objects connected to water. Water-related objects and their broad symbolic scope are a consistent feature throughout Bent’s practice, where the sculptural starting point is always pre-existing objects sourced from hardware stores, sports shops, or marine equipment stores. The emotional potential of the everyday objects is analysed and released through subsequent adaptations and combinations with other objects, resulting in condensed statements where objects familiar to us and our bodies approach us anew with surprising psychological depth.
Two swimming pool ladders mirror each other like skeletal creatures rising proudly, yet dazed. Soft fenders in protective yet restrictive cages form a symmetrical pair on the wall, eyeing each other like scarred torsos, separated yet connected. An empty boat cradle is mirrored around its own axis on the floor, waiting, full of the absent narrative of a ship that has sailed away with someone.
In all the works, different parts are connected by hoses and chains that simultaneously form solid circuits and nervous entanglements. Each sculpture maintains a quiet yet dramatic tension between something upward-striving and buoyant, and something heavy and anchoring – with weights, carabiners, and unbreakable chains – precisely capturing the ambiguous zone around the surface of the water. The symmetrical, psychosomatic sculptural bodies lean into and away from each other, simultaneously dependent and independent. They can scream “No, I DON’T WANNA FALL IN LOVE!!!” as much as they want.
– Tine Colstrup
