MICHAEL MØRK Neighbourhood
SEIMI NØRREGAARD Væggene har ører (The Walls Have Ears)
NANNA DEBOIS BUHL & TAMAR GUIMARÃES
Thinking AloudEXHIBITION: 18 NOVEMBER – 22 DECEMBER 2006 PRIVATE VIEW FRIDAY 17 NOVEMBER 2006 5-8PM
It is a great pleasure for OVERGADEN – Institute of Contemporary Art to present this autumn’s three exhibitions: a solo exhibition by Michael Mørk, an installation by Seimi Nørregaard, as well as a joint exhibition project by Nanna Debois Buhl and Tamar Guimarães. Michael Mørk is showing new works on the whole of the ground floor in the exhibition Neighbourhood. Michael Mørk works with painting in an expanded field with references to conceptual painting, Minimalism and Pop art. Neighbourhood is one big installation, the individual elements of which also function as independent works, among others a ramp with randomly built in steps, that enters into a direct dialogue with OVERGADEN’s architecture in the first room of the ground floor. Other places in the exhibition the paintings have grown up over the visitor’s head and appear as big three-dimensional boxes. The paintings move towards becoming objects in the space of the room, and the room moves toward becoming a picture – but a picture where the viewer must give up the breadth of view. In Neighbourhood Michael Mørk has inserted small moments of resistance in his otherwise pure minimalist expression, thereby emphasising contrasts between plane and space, between abstraction and figuration.The exhibition is supported by the Danish Arts Council, Københavns Kommunes Billedkunstudvalg, Akzo Nobel and Grosserer L.F. Foghts Foundation.Seimi Nørregaard, performer, scenographer and writer, exhibits a new installation on the first floor at OVERGADEN entitled Væggene har ører (The Walls Have Ears). The installation presents a small, apparently modest one room apartment with enticing labyrinthine caves and cavities that the visitor can move around in and explore. In a surprising way, the work breaks down the borders between performance, installation art, poetry and sound art and appeals to the viewer’s extended sensory apparatus. Nørregaard manages to lay the ground for a new communication with the participant in this enigmatic, poetic and humorous universe inhabited by fantastic figures. Væggene har ører can thus be characterised as a spatial poem that opens up for tales about the everyday, about life and death.The exhibition is presented with support from the Danish Arts Council and the National Workshop for Arts and Crafts.The two artists Nanna Debois Buhl and Tamar Guimarães are also presented on the first floor with the exhibition Thinking Aloud.Nanna Debois Buhl’s new video installation Postkort – Tivoli (Postcards – Tivoli) takes as its point of departure Copenhagen’s legendary amusement park Tivoli and the idea of “the Oriental”. The work reflects upon architecture, history writing and the staging of the national past and present. Tamar Guimarães’ new slide projection, Jan Leton and the Archive, tells the story of the Danish-West Indian slave Leton and his life and death in Skagen at the beginning of the 19th century, as the tale has wandered and changed through 130 years of written sources. In addition, the two artists’ joint project Det smukkeste sted (The Most Beautiful Place) will be presented, a short film constructed as a series of tableaux in which groups of people recite fragments from a Danish language course along with various sequences from national-romantic folk songs. Thinking Aloud thematises general aspects of the nature of history writing and of cultural identity within the framework of the Northern region’s colonial history.The exhibition is supported by the Danish Arts Council and NIFCA.