Artists: Ghislaine Leung, Christian Vind, Michael Kennedy Costa, Falke Pisano, Signe Boe, Jacob Borges, K.R.M. Mooney, Thomas Locher, Violet Dennison, Marie Søndergaard Lolk, Bill Jenkins, Penny Slinger, Thomas Bo Østergaard, Lucia Elena Průša, Willy Ørskov
Exhibition title: Some of the Hole
Venue: Simian, Copenhagen, Denmark
Date: September 5 – October 17, 2020
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Simian, Copenhagen
Some of the Hole seeks to draw coordinates between architecture, nature, body, mind and art; a mapping that explores notions of spaces, gaps and holes in their individual and collective states.
The exhibition presents a selection of artists working in an array of media from handcrafted and readymade to painting, drawing and text. The works are presented as autonomous objects, derived from personal and singular positions. Assembled as parts of a constructed setting, they align and expand into configurations of material and symbolic synergy.
Some of the Hole relates to the geographical surroundings of the exhibition space. In the recent past, Ørestad was a natural reserve in an outlying part of Copenhagen, which city planners turned into a metropolitan area over the course of just twenty years. The newly built city is characterized by large-scale modern architecture, traversed by sharp infrastructural lines. Corporate businesses, hotels, housing areas and one of the largest shopping malls in Scandinavia are surrounded by vacant lots and large expanses of grasslands and preserved nature. A terrain vague, a void with the potential to be filled, built upon and inhabited; Ørestad is an ongoing experiment in how to conceive an environment for future generations.
Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan asserts that, metaphorically, architecture can be seen as a structure around an inner void, a lack as he calls it. The only function of this, is to present the void which it is built around. Like a vase, characterized by the space it encompasses. Art, as he perceives it, is the representation of the void itself, an imaginary transfiguration of something that is lacking in us all. That which is placed inside the architectural frame as fleeting content. This symbiotic construction of changing desires and unknown wants, never to be wholly filled, leaves us in search of an ungraspable object, the shape of the hole.
When the Surrealists examined the relationship between dream and reality, they considered architecture to be a representation of reality and the boundaries of both the external and internal world. Within this construct, the spirit can roam free in a dreamlike manner, able to challenge confining frameworks and find new outlets. An unrestricted type of worldbuilding, where new territories, landscapes and constructions unfold and reveal themselves. As a place of inception, from where elusive ideas can emerge and bind themselves in material form as works of art.
Some of the Hole is a communal site, an interface that intends to question the spaces and holes in and between things that can’t be directly addressed, though present in their intrinsic absence.
