Maria Meinild at Den Frie Centre for Contemporary Art

Artist: Maria Meinild

Exhibition title: NEW FEELING

Curated by: FAUNA

Venue: Den Frie Centre for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark

Date: December 2, 2022 – March 26, 2023

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Den Frie Centre for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen

In the exhibition NEW FEELING, Danish visual artist Maria Meinild explores power relations, behavioral patterns, and empathy – both in relation to personal intimate relationships and larger institutional structures.

The exhibition focuses on the interfaces between automatic psychological reactions, personal experiences and political dilemmas. The video pieces are based on a group-based form of therapy, called psychodrama, where role-playing, spontaneity, and exposure of ingrained behavioral patterns, are used to dramatize reality from a given perspective.

The environments in Maria Meinild’s video works alternate between being a therapeutic space, an educational institution, an office landscape and a political arena. The piece Great Game of Power presents the viewer with a fictitious police school exercise, where four cadets must arrange chairs in different formations – based on the instruction that one chair is more powerful than the others. The work is viewed through a peephole in the wall, which creates a sense of intimacy, while exploring the tension between the staged and the concealed, between surveilling and being surveilled.

NEW FEELING is curated by the exhibition platform FAUNA, which is temporarily resurrected at Den Frie Udstillingsbygning to present Maria Meinild’s solo exhibition.

In her practice, Maria Meinild (SE/DK) often combines methods from the theater world with studies of how social structures such as communities and institutions relate to individual experiences. Meinild lives and works in Copenhagen and is educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna.

FAUNA was founded as an exhibition platform in 2013 and was run by art historian Olga Nowotny and artist Rolf Nowotny. FAUNA opened its exhibition space, as response to their desire to create a flexible exhibition space, working with an experimental approach to the curatorial work. FAUNA functioned as a platform where international artists, could be shown for the first time in Denmark, with Danish colleagues to present projects and exhibitions

Maria Meinild, NEW FEELING, 2022, installation view, Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Malle Madsen