Matteo Cantarella is pleased to present The next morning in the Industrion, an installation of new works and the gallery’s first presentation with Danish artist Vibe Overgaard. Through an artistic practice that encompasses sculpture, installation, video, and writing, Overgaard’s work brings forth political and theoretical questions regarding the bodily, material and aesthetic conditions that anchor capitalism to the legacy of our social infrastructures. While oftentimes focusing on specific contexts – Overgaard draws important parallels to her own upbringing in a Danish industrial town, founded as a manufacturing centre for textiles – her work sheds reflections about the frailty of ecosystems, social responsibility and sustainable forms of organisation.
The next morning in the Industrion comprises an installation of sculptural works, some protruding from the walls while other modularly rising to the ceiling. The exhibition title seemingly suggests a sense of promise for a future, the idea of a dormant horizon of possibility: another sun rising, the inevitability of the new day, the eternal planetary rhythms cyclicly re-illuminating the world. The exhibition, however, is set in a windowless capsule which contradicts the same promise of a new day rising, thus evoking a sense of premonition and impending doom. The sculptures appear solemn and melancholic, staging the underground space as a capsule holding remnants of an undefined civilisation. Wading through uncertain times – be it in the past, future, or at one’s fingertip – the works collide somewhere between the humanity’s historical past and the advent of a technological future while rendering both equally distant and impossible to reach.
In her work, Overgaard deals with mundane and industrial materials, ranging from scaffoldings, concrete, bolts to timber, clay and natural fibres that speak to issues of industrialisation and socioeconomic disparity, hallmarks of the neoliberal aftermath. The ambivalent choice of materials, the simultaneity of internal and external structures, the contrast between the organic and the mechanical, and the tactility of the employed means, are all deeply inherent to the artist’s practice. The circuit is also a recurring motif: the fibre that winds through the sculptures evokes the spinning of industrial looms, while also bringing to the fore the politics and poetics of manual labour against the standardised and depersonalised production that is the global industrial norm. For Overgaard, the thread stands a complex system of knowledge with existential and social dimensions that connect communities across time and space. In its endless spinning, the thread also epitomises the impossibility to conceive something radically other – outside the circuit – when our resources – material, cognitive and unconscious – are exhausted. Addressing this larger paradigm, the exhibition proposes small-scale gestures of agency and responsibility – it reaches towards a more thoughtful understanding of global citizenship, social forms organised around the mutual needs of human bodies, communities, and ecologies. Though as the title suggests, the exhibition strives to imagine a way out in some faraway, brighter future, for Overgaard the space for an alternative is to be found right here and now, underground.
Vibe Overgaard (b.1987, Denmark) is a Danish artist working with installation, sculpture, performance, text, and video. Overgaard graduated with an MFA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (2017) in Copenhagen, Denmark and holds a BFA from Gerrit Rietveld Academie (2013) in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Her work has been exhibited at ISCP (New York, US), Adagio for Things at Overgaden (Copenhagen, DK), Floating Projects (Hong Kong, CN), Den Frie Udstillingsbygning (Copenhagen, DK), Hotel Maria Kapel (Hoorn, NL) and with f.eks at Kunsthal NORD (Aalborg, DK) among others.
