Artist: Nanna Abell
Exhibition title: Psychodile
Curated by: Paola Paleari and Anne Zychalak Stolten
Venue: Vestjyllands Kunstpavillon, Videbæk, Denmark
Date: August 27 – September 25, 2022
Photography: Jacob Friis-Holm Nielsen / images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Vestjyllands Kunstpavillon
“And you feel that it’s a gift because you experience, right at the source, the suddenly indubitable present of existing miracuolously and materially.”
– Clarice Lispector, Água Viva
In Nanna Abell’s solo exhibition Psychodile at Vestjyllands Kunstpavillon lies an invitation to become material. The found objects – although selected and arranged by the artist – have always already been modelled by external conditions, and their surfaces carry physical ornaments of climate, consumption, exhaustion, fire, moist, desire, décor.
A lost flip flop dried up by the sun and sea salt appears in line with some of the exhibition building’s distinctive features; all together they act as a touch point – a sensory outset suggesting that the objects’ most subtle characteristics play a guiding role in these compositions.
Abell’s sculptural organizations contain something untranslatable and non-reproducible: an anchor to the now and a physical specificity that attends to our body and receptiveness. As an alternative to the modus operandi of the information age – which trains us to scan existence through data, symbols and representation – the artist proposes entering in contact with what we don’t recognize and can’t categorize. Simply, but not easily, we are asked to stay with what is present.
Rather than exhibiting single works, Abell establishes a framework where materiality doesn’t concern only the physical qualities in themselves, but also and foremost the poetry of human, messy affairs with the physical outside world.
Psychodile is a suggestive attitude that seeks stimuli in an analogue register. Weak intensity should not be confused with weak effect. It is an exercise in sensitivity and surrender that Nanna Abell invites us into.
The exhibition is supported by The Danish Arts Foundation. The VK contemporary art program 2021-2022 is curated by Paola Paleari and Anne Zychalak Stolten and supported by Det Obelske
