Scewer, 2022, 'FOOD GALORE'. Gl. Holtegaard. Photo: David Stjernholm,
-Sugar-glazed jellyfish
Burnt acrylic plastic, sugar, silicone.
-Wolf's head with burrs
Flamingo, felt, mud, and burrs.
-Isomalt-glazed chrysalis
Flamingo, rice, Isomalt, and film
-Gingerbread temple with seaweed
Oak, MDF, gingerbread, roasted seaweed, isomalt, Kompeitou
-Chip of melted microplastic with a sprinkle of salt crystals
Melted plastic, salt crystals
-Fat bat
Flamingo, vegetarian fat with garlic and flavor enhancers
Steel spear with stainless steel feet in a wooden tub with 300 liters of used McDonald's cooking oil.
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Pla¥, 2020 bronze, ⌀150 x d4,5 cm. ARKEN Museum of Modern Art 2022 (Photo: Frida Gregersen)
A gigantic bronze coin stands upright, pressed into the grass and soil – as if a giant had had the coin in its hand, and tried to stick it into the earth in a stupid attempt to give nature back its minerals – or as if the earth itself was a slot machine.
The work touches upon different anthropogenic issues, such as the conversion of natural resources into profit, which won’t be able to be exchanged, as well as a societal and technological development whose only global concord seems to be growth.
The front of the coin presents a sort of tree of life or fertility goddess with her head surrounded by different kinds of wildlife. Its erotic appearance reflects the comprehensive force of attraction in kingdom of plants and animals, as well as a human desire in the guise of a naked female body.
Unlike the heteronormative view on gender and sexuality dominating most of society, wild nature makes up an endlessly broad spectrum for sex, gender, reproduction and symbiotic relationships, like the hermaphroditism of snails and plants, or the co-existence across different species such as lichen, which is a mix between fungi and algae.
Pla¥, 2020 bronze, ⌀150 x d4,5 cm. ARKEN Museum of Modern Art 2022 (Photo: Frida Gregersen)
The back of the coin presents some kind of trickster – a dancing jellyfish with four eyes. According to the theory of The Rise of Slime (Jeremy Jackson, 2008), in the future, as a consequence of oxygen depletion, climate change, overfishing and pollution, it will only be the most primitive organisms, like jellyfish, algae and bacteria, who will be capable of living in the oceans.
The extinction of the diverse marine life, that has emerged through many millions of years of evolution, will have fatal consequences for the life on earth, which is so deeply dependent of – and symbiotically connected with – the ecosystems of the sea.
Thus, the two-parted shape of the work contains different narratives. On one side, it contemplates being viewed in the shadow of human actions. On the other side, it can be viewed as a kind of tree of life, in a mythological as well as a biological sense. Furthermore, the coin appeals to something semiotically incorporated in modern human beings – a sort of archetypical symbol of wealth, luck, or growth, to which the opportunistic part of consciousness is automatically drawn. Like that, the coin in its gigantic shape can be seen as a materialization of human desire, and a symbolic redistribution of this vital force, down into the earth and out in the planetary.
Pla¥ has been realized with support from: The Danish Arts Foundation and Grosserer L.F. Foghts Fond
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re:prʘductiʘn - Køgevej 5 - Museum of Contemporary art, Roskilde, 2021
re:prʘductiʘn - Køgevej 5 - Museum of Contemporary art, Roskilde, 2021
re:prʘductiʘn looks into natural processes, like sex, reproduction and symbiosis, from both a human and non-human perspective.
On the roof of an old cooling tower, a neon sign with bright colors signifies that the building has been given a new life. The sign is inspired by various species of lichen – a composite organism made up of fungi living in a symbiotic relationship with algae.
The discovery of how lichen is composed of both mushroom and algae (Simon Schwendener 1867) led to the term symbiosis (Albert Frank 1877).
While algae draw energy from sunlight (photosynthesis), mushroom feeds on other organisms (living or dead), and is taxonomically more comparable to animals than plants. With lichen covering 7-8 % of the planet’s surface, it’s a most common and evident example of symbiosis between species of radical different natures.
The neon sign atop of the building attempts to give these exemplary organisms attention, at the same time it alludes to sex shops and advertisements found in major cities.
The inside of the cooling tower can be viewed through peepholes in the walls. In there, wooden sculptures, depicting overgrown amphibians, dwell in the mud. Like the building itself, the sculptures are being eaten by organisms transforming dead material into new growth. Different species of fungi grow out of the sculptures. The fungi are kept damp by steam, billowing from a plateau in the middle of the room. On top of the plateau lies a flower made of sugar and isomalt. Like the stamens of real flowers, the sculpture attracts various insects, but in contrast to the pollination, which typically takes place between flowers and bees, the sculpture makes no contribution to reproduction in nature. On the contrary, it acts as a kind of false nectar, that robs nature’s real flowers of the possibility of being pollinated, since the insects will be more attracted to the artificial sugar flower.
During the exhibition period, re:prʘductiʘn will become a breeding ground for non-human life forms and human fantasies alike.
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re:prʘductiʘn is supportet by the Danish Arts Foundation.
re:prʘductiʘn is part of the group show ‘Bubbles – an art route through the city’, with studio collective 51cth, organized by Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde
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System, 2023, bioconcrete on steel structure, 209H x 95W x 150D - Reset Materials - Towards Sustainable Architecture, Copenhagen Contemporary
Can non-human nature help us imagine different ways of building and dwelling in a decarbonized world? The work titled System seeks to bring to our attention a different ecological imaginary concerning our architectural and build environment. It suggests a more-than-human ecology of cross-species solidarity, inspiration and care as one way of freeing ourselves from the material base and ideological constraints of our current fossil fuel infused reality.
System both embodies a new process of production and shows an architectural vision inspired by nonhuman nature. It is made of biocement, a building material manufactured by using the natural biomineralization process occurring in nature, where the metabolism between an organism and its environment creates rock-formations and shells. The motif depicts what looks like a snail shell, itself an example of these biomineralization processes, with branches or roots growing out of it. The shape seems to resemble that of a human figure and its nervous system thereby highlighting the common “subterranean” reality of different organic systems, roots and nerves. At an even deeper level, the fact that the motif is made in biocement gives the impression that the motif itself were a product of the process of fossilization, a form arrested in time that implies deeper geological forces at play.
From this point of view, System pulls our imagination towards a perception of different time scales and an eerie feeling presents itself; the fossil-like structure and the human-like image reminds us that by the continued burning of fossil fuels we humans are becoming fossils-in-the-making ourselves. The fossils of the past haunts us as an image of our own future. At the same time, the artwork imagines an alternative future, which flows directly from the material reality of biocement and the promise of a differently sustained world based on ecologically sound building materials. System’s use and depiction of the process of biomineralization contains within it a concrete utopian reality: a space opens up for re-imagining the necessary connection between products and processes of mineralization and organic growth and biological life. It envisions the condition of possibility of a new way of dwelling and inhabiting the earth, where architecture and our build environment will base itself on similar mineralization processes and where people will inhabit “shell”-like houses with organically behaving structures constructed by microbes and other biological entities. Ways of dwelling that will be more conducive over time for human and non-human lifeforms.
Text; Martin Karlsson Pedersen, June 2023
System has been made in collaboration with BioMason and 3XN GXN, and has been support by Dreyers Fond
steel structure is made with help from jdcign