Artist: Sidsel Meineche Hansen
Exhibition title: Flat 46, Twyford house, Chisley Rd., N15 6PA, £250.000
Venue: Christian Andersen, Copenhagen, Denmark
Date: August 13 – September 15, 2021
Photography: Malle Madsen / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Christian Andersen, Copenhagen
The title of this show is an address. It is also someone’s home and someone else’s property. Eight drawings on silk have been made from the marketing photographs from the flat’s online listing. Together these works are titled ‘home vs owner 3’ (2021). These drawings, as well as the drawing ‘Butterfly’ (2021), is made with a chemical dye named methylene blue. The dye is also a drug. Methylene blue is closely associated with the rise of the psychopharmaceutical industry as it was prescribed to patients with psychotic symptoms at the end of the 19th century.
Next door is ‘Hollow Eyed’ (2017) a series of wall-mounted wax cast sculptures in silicon metal. Each metal sculpture is hung by two industrial nails – one through each eye socket. The sculptures function as trigger-objects for the app OVER (2017). It opens with a clip of an argument between an Uber driver and the former CEO of Uber Travis Kalanick and adds an augmented layer of animation onto each of these sculptural elements.
In ‘End-Used City 2077 (Ft. Keanu Reeves)’ (2019/2021) a Leviathan-like avatar greets the viewer in the voice of Alex Karp, CEO of the software and surveillance company Palantir Technologies. Just like the video game Cyberpunk 2077 – in which Reeves’ full body scan was recently incorporated – you can use a game controller to enter three short videos filmed in London. Each video explores different aspects of surveillance from the first-person perspective: the underground, the receptionist and CCTV footage from a council-run tower block, and in a person’s home and mind. In this collage, filmed material is sporadically overlaid with ink symbols, the letters O-C-E-A-N, referencing the Big 5 personality model central to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and the logo of the spyware Pegasus.
Across the room from ‘End-Used City 2077’, a bronze piggy bank named ‘Anti-’ (2017) unassumingly takes up space on the gallery floor. Within the contemporary digitalised economy the piggy bank is an almost obsolete relic of physical money and speaks to a time when capital was centralised and palpable. Anti-’s cuteness reflects the artist’s ability to conjoin the insipid with the startlingly real. It represents a value opposite the funds collected within it.
