Artist: Rune Bering
Exhibition title: Bycatch
Venue: Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen, Denmark
Date: February 10 – July 28, 2024
Photography: ©Hampus Berndtson, all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen
The exhibition Bycatch was created with reference to Nikolaj Kunsthal’s past as a maritime church named after Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors. Using the fishing industry as a thematic frame, Rune Bering investigates the cycle of destruction, death and rebirth through a series of new works.
Bering is particularly concerned with systems which he examines minutely and reinterprets in new forms that relate physically to the space in which they are displayed. At the Upper Gallery, he has entered into a dialogue with the history and architecture of the building by working sculpturally with fish traps as catching nets.
Bycatch takes as its point of departure the story of the fish as a symbol of the fishing industry, which today has a decisive importance for the critical state of the oceans. With this, the artist articulates the complex contexts that today are associated with fishing and allows the exhibition to be an account of both catching and being caught – not only in terms of fishing but also in the optimisation processes of the modern world and technological development of which we are all part.
From the ceiling hang fish traps woven from found copper cables which like the blood vessels of technology secure the infrastructure of a data-driven society. Bering’s work with the copper fishing nets is made by hand using the traditional and now rare craft of wader binding which he learned with the help of retired fishermen. This cumbersome and timeconsuming production method appears as a deteriorating counterpoint to the rapidly growing efficiency practiced by the information society. By intertwining traditional craftmanship with new materials, Bering creates a connection between past and future that gives rise to rethinking the systems we vase our society on today.
In the exhibition, there is a pervasive inspiration from Ouroboros,a movement and way of thinking that can be traced back to ancient times, as a symbol of fertilisation and rebirth in an eternal cycle. Ouroboros is often symbolised as a snake that eats its own tail and was especially used in, among other fields, mediaeval alchemy with its experimentation with the change of metals. This way of thinking expresses a special kind of wholeness as a result of a meeting between opposites that allows new systems to emerge.
By allowing technology to be a prerequisite for the future and looking back at how we have used nature and the riches of the oceans for many years, the artist, like an alchemist, tries to think of new things about material contexts and ways of dealing with basic elements. At the same time, Bering questions the possibility of making subjective choices in a self-created system in which one has become a victim of one’s own efficiency and ended up as bycatch.
”In this exhibition, I work sculpturally with emotions which I believe are characteristic of our time. We know that we live in a way that can’t last, but at the same time the feeling is that we can’t change it. We live in structures that interfere with each other and that are too complex to really understand, change and get out of. It feels like we are caught in our own net”.
– Rune Bering, 2024
Rune Bering was born in 1984 and graduated from the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen in 2013. Bycatch is his first major solo exhibition at an established art institution and consists of completely new works created specifically for Nikolaj Kunsthal’s Upper Gallery.
