COMPOSING SPACES

2015 Gjethuset Gallery, Frederiksvaerk, Denmark

This exhibition was devised in collaboration with artists Christina Deuland and Natasha Rydvald. 

The exhibition was the continuation of conversations begun at a seminar; ‘Joining Forces’ with brook & black and J&K (Janne Schafer and Kristine Agergaard, Fabrikken for Kunst og design, Copenhagen, 2013), this seminar focused on collaborations within the arts and more specifically on two-person collaborations, where the work of one artist cannot be separated from that of the other. In other words looking at co-authorship today, its cost and its benefits.

PRESS RELEASE – April, 2015

Christina Duelund and Natascha Rydvald two contemporary Danish artists met UK artists brook & black in Berlin in 2012 and have since been involved in discussions and collaborative exchanges with them, the fruits of which are given vibrant form in the exhibition: Composing Spaces. This exhibition offers the audience a unified, collaborative but multi layered consideration of the themes and thoughts that the four artists have shared and developed over the last two years.   These themes include those of architectural and internal space; of the illusion of security offered by mundane repetition; of our human concern to create stable, safe homes against the backdrop of a seemingly increasingly unstable world ‘outside’; and the exploration of the concepts of collaboration and even communication itself.

In the extraordinary interior of Gjerthuset - a building listed in 1761 as a cannon foundry, the exhibition takes the form of four connected zones in which the artists construct their own imaginative spaces using, among other materials, video, wood, steel, mirror and fabric.  The four zones echo and cross reference each other, as the artists’ collaborative conversations have done, and the constructions grow into and articulate the 3-dimensional space above the floor-level drawing of the architectural footprints of the artists’ own homes. 

By working together, all four artists have been asked to question their ways of working and making.  They are sharing the outcome of this dialogue through the making of this new work, which contains both individual and collaborative elements, while it develops their conversation on both familiar and unfamiliar ground - this exhibition Composing Spaces will be followed in November 2015 by an ‘exchange’ exhibition in Oxford, UK titled Arkitektoniske Kramper.

Christina Bredahl Duelund - has exhibited widely in Denmark and received many awards and prizes, organized Arts Festivals and conducted workshops. Working (mostly) with 3D media she uses home, as a setting for much of her work, as a metaphor for a private space. She works in a minimalist idiom using formal, aesthetic considerations that are often highly poetic.

Natascha Rydvald - Is participating as a collaborative artist. She graduated from The Danish Film School in 1999 and has worked as a professional cinematographer and photographer while developing her work as an art film director and cinematographer. She has exhibited in Denmark and her beautiful work references human emotion, relationships, and the everyday.