Mia Line at JIR SANDEL

Artist: Mia Line

Exhibition title: Super Cogitandi

Curated by: JIR SANDEL

Venue: JIR SANDEL, Copenhagen, Denmark

Date: December 4 – 9, 2020

Photography: Malle Madsen / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and JIR SANDEL, Copenhagen

…but he supposes he knows something when he does not know, while I… eeeerrrr… just as I do not know, do not even suppose that I do. I am likely to be a little bit wiser than he in this very thing: that whatever I do not know, I do not even suppose I know.

Plato, Apology, section 21d

JIR SANDEL is pleased to present Super Cogitandi, a solo exhibition by Mia Line.

Through a jumble of references from popular culture, philosophy and everyday life, the show explores thought as a phenomenon and the activity of thinking as such. Thinking, thinking twice, overthinking.

The largest body of work is a bean bag chair shaped as a cartoon thought bubble. By playing on the sign’s familiarity, the work is immediately understood both in relation to its context and decoding. Even if it is characterized by a certain lightness, the bubble also symbolizes the materialization of the invisible. A bean bag chair is an impossibility of a chair that almost encapsulates the person sitting, making it difficult for them to get up again.

On the floor, cardboard letters spell out the sound eeeerrrr – a filler noise often employed in a speech flow when needing a few extra seconds to think about an adequate phrasing. At the same time, it shares spelling with ‘to err’, a synonym of ‘to fail’, and in Danish it is an inflection of ‘at være’ – ‘to be’.

Foam Fingers’ starting point is the paraphernalia item often seen at sports events, especially in the US. The two foam fingers in the exhibition depict Plato’s hand in the painting The School of Athens by Raphael and Socrates’ hand in the painting The Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David.

In the two pictures, both Plato and Socrates raise one hand up, gesturing the air with the index finger. The finger points to the realm of thought and ideas, where, accordingly to their theories, the highest principles of virtue lie and to which one must aspire.