Ten photographs of a flower: the digitalis purpae. (Velvety to the touch, it is both of medical use and highly toxic. Albert Renger-Patzsch had also subjected the fingerhut to his analogue lens a hundred years ago. Here, unlike his images, the flowers are isolated, a single “purple foxglove” per finger, one for each of our counting digits. Lest, of course, that hand be robotic—an end of arm tool, and not human.)
Connecting the village ofDamme, on the island of Møn, with the town of Vordingborg, the municipal seat of the eponymous commune in which they’re both located, is the route 664 Movia bus. A second point of connection is that they are home, respectively, to the artist couples Michala Paludan and Rasmus Røhling, and Maiken Bent and Torben Ribe. But with the former duo having never previously exhibited together, a scenario that fully contrasted with that of the latter, who themselves have a long history of joint exhibitions, an invitation to do a two-person show at ORTHUNGA was issued forth from the historic town hall, Kornerup’s Rådhus.
As many as thirty Amazon Dash Buttons. (An idea of what the “future” held in store, but now relics from a not-so-distant past. These physical push buttons would, at the touch of a finger, place an online order for a specific household product, imagining the internet as a vending machine for the dispersal of everything from laundry detergent and toothpaste to bottled water and milk chocolate biscuits.)
This proposal almost took the form of a dare, a challenge that was obviously accepted. But in agreeing to share the gallery’s exhibitions spaces, rather what we find is more like two shows in one, with the vertical and horizontal planes dialectically divided up and designated for exclusive use, one per artist. Where one hangs their work on the walls, moving across these flat areas from left to right, sequentially, one after another; the other employs the volume between the ceiling and the floor, building the works up, like palimpsests, with so many sedimentary layers.
A Petit Écolier milk chocolate cookie relief, and a Durer-esque engraving, among other objects. (This set of eclectic “images” are presented lying down, in scorsio, on one-meter-tall rods raising them up from the floor. Puffed up and glossy, each appears as if a “sticker” filter had been applied to it; when, in fact, exploration/ ultrasound gel drips on their faces from dispensers that are periodically squeezed by upper arm blood pressure cuffs suspended from the ceiling.)
With the script established, and the roles of the two artists cast, those of the space’s directors fixed, all that was needed was a writer. Which is where I come in: If one could assert that these two artist couples are a pair of twin planets orbiting within the same solar system, one could perhaps then say that I am a comet that visits the former nearly every year, and the latter roughly every five, having first met them all in 2011 while co-organizing an exhibition with Howie Chen at IMO, Maiken and Torben’s former space (with a group of fellow artists and directors Toke Lykkeberg and Julia Rodrigues) in Carlsberg, Copenhagen. While taking on the character of the 664 bus would be redundant, what I could inhabit instead was a version of Brooks Walker’s fifth wheel from the 1930s, installed at the back of an automobile at 90° to the other four so as to better facilitate parallel parking by moving the vehicle sideways.
Two images twitching on one supine flatscreen television. (Akin to an open-faced bagel sandwich covered in a schmear of cream cheese, visible through a thick layer of a Jell-O like substance gel—an image oscillates between an abstract, wound-like Philip Guston painting, and a still of a surgeon performing an auto-appendectomy. Mid-century modernism finds resonance with body trauma.)
In fact, in coming to think of this quartet of artists as a kind of rhyming couplet, the first draft of this text was a 400-word, five stanza poem, an inadvertently composed festsang. Talk about moving sideways. In its place—and borrowing from Google’s AI overview of the exhibition’s title, which it defines as the “original, unprocessed data points collected directly from a source for each individual observation or subject, without any aggregation, cleaning, or transformation”—I present a list of selected objects that, as of the date of writing, may or may not be in the exhibition. I’ll have to wait until closer to the exhibition’s closing in October to confirm in person; when this current roughly five-year cycle ends, and our orbits once again align.
Three blue rectangular prisms of varying heights (Each one wrapped in resistance bands, these three square columns or pedestal-like forms—one unadorned, one with the white Smurfs hat, one dressed like the Na’vi from the Avatar movies—form the kind of bar chart used to visualize data, while taking on the physical and nonsensical “mannerisms” of the animated characters that they evoke.)
—Tim Saltarelli
Michala Paludan (born 1983) lives and works in Copenhagen. Over the past decade, Paludan has examined how power is produced and negotiated across networks and movements in media such as video, photography, and installation. Paludan has exhibited widely in Scandinavia and abroad. Latest exhibitions include: h/ånd at Fotografisk Center, I Am Your Body: Automation at Kunsthal Aarhus and Strange Attraction på Malva, Finland. Currently Paludan is part of the group exhibition the Seed Savers at SMK Thy.In 2024 Disko Bay Books published her first book of photography The Unposed (EoAT).
Rasmus Røhling (b. 1982) lives and works in Copenhagen. Røhling works in video and sculpture, and his recent work deals with aspects of representation within the healthcare sector and how this iconification relates to art historical-as well as current political issues.
In Røhling’s practice, dealing with representation is just as much about withholding and re-coding “images”, as it is about creating new ones. In his works Røhling often hijacks existing images, objects or phenomena, as to indoctrinate- and re-associate them with new meanings.
Previous exhibitions include Simian (DK), Soldes (US), Den Frie Udstillingsbygning (DK), Sismografo (PT), Human Resources (US), Artist Space (US), Art Hub Copenhagen (DK), Museum Fur Gegenwartskunst Basel (CH) and Primer (DK).
