Jacob Tækker ”Satellite”
OPENING: FRIDAY FEBRUARY 16.
MOGADISHNI AAR proudly presents the video installation ”Satellite” by Danish artist Jacob Tækker (b. 1977). Jacob Tækker received his education at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.
The exhibition ”Satellite” transforms the White Cube gallery space into a Black Box containing his large scale video installation. Tækker positions himself as the performer in his work, and has developed a method that mixes shots of scaled model settings with a blue/green screen technique to immerse himself into his models. This creates a visual expression combining old-fashioned trick filming with modern collage techniques. The 10 minute film is shown as one endless loop, but contains a certain narrative development and eventual climax.
The ”Satellite” project is inspired by the Soviet cosmonaut Sergei Konstantinovich Krikalev. He became stranded on the MIR space station for 311 days, 20 hours and 1 minute, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. He holds the record for the most time spent in space by a human being.
The film is set in outer space on an MIR-resembling space station inhabited by only one man, who is the focal point of the film. The man leads a trivial and uniform daily life, weightless and circling the earth. The images show a person isolated and lonely, as if he himself were the satellite. The film thus centers on the feeling of alienation, not just from society, but also from oneself. The artist thereby depicts the emotional nuances of a person’s loneliness, in the periphery of human and physical space.
In his artistic oeuvre, Jacob Tækker deals with emotional conditions, the routines of daily life, the human imagination and reasons of our acts. The video installation also shows the tragicomic sides of life, through images that often manipulate dimensions and comment on the relation between fiction and reality.