Louise Bonde-Hansen (DK)
Considered to be Allies (DK)
Malou da Cunha Bang (DK)
Julie Falk (DK)
Mads Juel (DK)
Anne Langgaard (DK)
Sonja Lillebæk Christensen (DK)
Helene Manaa-Vestergaard (DK)
Camilla Rasborg (DK)
Anne Skole Overgaard (DK)
Hartmut Stockter (DE)
Aske Thiberg (SE/DK)

Sorgenfri

30/10-22/11 2020

Curator: Maja Gade Christensen (DK)


SE
Galleri CC är glada att presentera Sorgenfri, en utställning av konstnärer från Udstillingsstedet Sydhavn Station i Köpenhamn.

Utställningen är döpt efter området där Galleri CC ligger. Några av verken förhåller sig till platsen och andra tar utgångspunkt i Sorgenfri som ord eller stämning. Sorgenfri anspelar på att något är fritt från sorg, sorger och bekymmer. Men kanske låter det mer som en önskan eller ett hopp än ett konstaterande.

I bostadsområdet runt Galleri CC står åtta billboards, så att utställningen även kan upplevas i Sorgenfris offentliga rum. Sonja Lillebæk Christensens fyra billboards tar avstamp i de byggnader som omger galleriet och som är formade av modernismens ideal. De ville skapa ett bättre samhälle genom rationella, geometriska och hygieniska hem med solljus och gröna omgivningar. Hon frågar om människor kan leva i en utopi - och om utopier kan leva i människor.

På fyra andra billboards har Aske Thiberg återskapat sovrum i 3D, som tillhör ungdomar som isolerat sig från samhället genom att inte lämna sina hem under längre perioder. Han har stött på dem i ett europeiskt chattrum online, där de kallar sig själva för "hikis" vilket kommer från det japanska ordet “Hikikomori” vilket betyder: Att fängsla sig själv.

Inuti Galleri CC hänger runda keramikplattor med motiv från Sorgenfri, målade i akvarell av Anne Skole Overgaard. En skulptur av en vemodig Basset-hund i baddräkt är Louise Bonde-Hansens monument över ett flyktigt barndomsminne. Den omöjliga och utopiska önskan om att hålla fast vid det förgängliga är också ett tema hos Anne Langaard, som har gjutit av en bag-in-box i brons och gett skulpturen titeln Sorg är kärlekens pris. En serie små grafiska tryck av Malou da Cunha Bang går tätt på ett par som har sex, i denna intima stund samexisterar närhet, distans, monotoni och förtrolighet. Kropparna upplöses nästan i abstrakta former. Helene Manaa-Vestergaard målar sorglösa, absurda dagdrömmar på glansigt tyg, men något ligger och lurar under ytan… Camilla Rasborg har använt det psykologiska fenomenet Pareidolia och förvandlat två kasserade skåpsluckor till ansiktsreliefer, som tittar utifrån deras förlorade funktion i hemmet.Hartmut Stockter har byggt en rått-omvandlare, där de vanligtvis föraktade råttorna kan fästa en buskig svans på sin bakdel och förvandlas till den populära ekorren. Konstnärsduon Considered to be Allies / Mie Frederikke Fischer Christensen & Margaux Parillaud har filmat en solförmörkelse från en campingplats - en kollektiv euforisk upplevelse som också kan tolkas som en varning om kommande tider.

Utställningsrummets mörka källare har förvandlats till ett udda skulpturalt väntrum av Julie Falk, ett konkretiserat mentalt limbo, med fotografier på väggarna av Mads Juel. Ett samtida kollektivt väntrum där du kan sitta och bläddra i hans Bella Fortuna Magazine om den framtid vi väntar och hoppas på.

Utställningen är en del av ett utbyte mellan Galleri CC och Udstillingsstedet Sydhavn Station som båda är konstnärsdrivna gallerier. I september ställde konstnärerna från Galleri CC ut på Udstillingsstedet Sydhavn Station, som ligger i en tågstation i Köpenhamn.



EN
Gallery CC proudly presents “Sorgenfri”, an exhibition by the artists from the exhitibion space Sydhavn Station in Copenhagen.


The exhibition is named Sorgenfri (Free of Sorrow) - a reference to the name of the area in Malmö in which Gallery CC is located. Some of the works in the exhibition situate themselves within the context of Sorgenfri as a site, while others approach the  title more poetically, as a word or a mood to depart from or question. While Sorgenfri might very well translate to Free of Sorrow, there is something self-contradicting in it that perhaps reads more like a wish than a reality.

Eight billboards are placed in the residential area surrounding Galleri CC, so the exhibition also can be experienced in the public space of the Sorgenfri neighbourhood as well as in the exhibition space. Sonja Lillebæk Christensen focuses on the local apartment blocks with her four billboards. Shaped by modernism's ideal of creating a better society through rational, geometric and hygienic homes with sunlight and green surroundings, Lillebæk Christensen questions whether humans can live in such a utopia - and whether utopias can live within us humans. On the remaining four billboards, Aske Thiberg has made a 3D rendering of rooms belonging to young people who have isolated themselves from society by locking themselves inside their room for extended periods of time.

Aske connected with the young people in a European chat room, where they refer to themselves as "Hikis" deriving from the Japanese word for “self-imprisonment".

Inside Gallery CC round ceramic plates hang with motifs from Sorgenfri, painted with watercolour by Anne Skole Overgaard. Louise Bonde-Hansen's sculpture of a melancholic Basset hound in a bathing suit is a memorial to a fleeting childhood recollection of the artist. The impossible - and utopian desire to maintain the transient is also a theme in Anne Langgaards work. Langgaard is showing a bag-in-a-box wine casted in bronze titled Sorrow is the price of love. Malou da Cunha Bang is exhibiting a series of small graphic prints showing close-ups of a couple having sex. In the intimate moment, confidentiality, distance, monotony and intimacy coexist as the bodies dissolve into almost abstract shapes. Helene Manaa-Vestergaard paints untroubled, trippy daydreams on shiny fabric, where something lurks just below the surface. Camilla Rasborg is working with the psychological phenomenon called pareidolia and has reshaped two discarded cupboard doors into reliefs of faces now surveying the room while mourning the loss of their practical function in the home. Hartmut Stockter has built a rat converter. By attaching a bushy tail to the bum of the often-despised rat, thus transforming it into the ever popular squirrel. The artist duo Considered to be Allies / Mie Frederikke Fischer Christensen & Margaux Parillaud have filmed the experience of a total solar eclipse - a collective euphoria and/or a premonition of times to come. The dark basement of the exhibition space has been transformed into a strange sculptural waiting room - a concretised mental limbo by Julie Falk, with photographs on the walls by Mads Juel. A contemporary collective waiting room, where you can sit and flip through his Bella Fortuna Magazine, about the future we are waiting - and hoping for.

The exhibition is part of an exchange between Galleri CC and the exhibition space Sydhavn Station, which are both artist run spaces. In September the artists from Galleri CC exhibited at the exhibition space Sydhavn Station, which is located within a train station in Copenhagen.



Louise Bonde-Hansen (DK)
Both of my works on display at Sorgenfri originate in something that has an im- mediate sentimental character, nevertheless they make me feel sincere sympathy. The sculpture Basset depicts a basset hound wearing a bathing suit with red and white stripes. I sculpted it after my memory of a bath towel I had as a child. I always became a bit sad when I was was swathed in the towel, because I wanted to take care of the sad looking dog. The dog is a kind of monument of a fleeting moment I cannot preserve. At the same time, it is an image of the need for care and the need for caring for somebody, that everyone of us has.

The other piece, Vesuvio, is a series of different plaster casts of bast bottles. It is a reference to the Italian restaurant, which is almost an institution in its own right. I have a strong affection for the Italian restaurant. To me it represents something very familiar, a democratic place, where most people know the menu and where you don’t leave hungry.

Louise Bonde-Hansen (b. 1987) works with sculpture, installation and collage. Her references are founded in personal experiences and she often makes use of sentimental or kitsch aestetics but with the intention of transcending the clumpsy concreteness of the works and envoking a sense of sympathy within the viewer. Louise Bonde-Hansen has graduated from Goldsmiths University of London (UK) BA Fine Arts in 2014 and Academie der Bildende Künste, Wien (AT) mag. artium. 2018.

Considered to be Allies (DK)
Margaux Parillaud & Mie Frederikke Fischer Christensen (FR/DK)
Décalage
1 gap, discrepancy
2 (astronomy, technology) shift, offset
3 time shifting (practice of recording a broadcast for later watching or listening)
4 jet lag

Décalage documents the collective euphoria surrounding the total solar eclipse of 2017. Passing in front of the sun the moon covers it completely and for a moment leaving only a shimmering corona of light visible. Historically such an event, brea- king with the natural cycle, was considered a bad omen, but in 2017 it became the one event to unite an increasingly divided North America under one sun. “Déca- lage” refers to a lack or a loss. A lack in time, in experience or in communication. As with so many of nature’s spectacles we are unable to fully document or share our experience afterwards. A lack occurs, creating a feeling of alienation from the experience - rather than empathy. The entrance point to the experience does not happen through the grained image of a black dot on the sky but rather through the documentation of the “totaled” people experiencing it.

Décalage, a lack, can also refer to the time gap or jet-lag, between the unifying euphoria of the Eclipse in 2017 and the covid-19 reality of today. In hindsight the Eclipse could easily be read as a foreshadowing of things to come and the pande- mic as the collective hangover from the collective euphoria.

Considered to be Allies / Margaux Parillaud and Mie Frederikke Fischer Christensen is a French/ Danish artist duo based in between Rennes (FR) and Copenhagen (DK). Collaborating since 2014, their work emerges from a mutual interest in the way pop culture reinforces social constructs and impacts our perception of reality. Margaux Parillaud and Mie Frederikke Fischer Christensen both graduated with their Bachelors in Fine arts from Rietveld Academy of Fine arts in 2016. Mie Fre- derikke Fischer graduated with her Master in Fine art from School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018.

Malou da Cunha Bang (DK)
These small intimate prints show a couple having sex. In long term relationships the sexual act can be a pseudo show, oscillating in an and out of intimacy.
On some prints the posture/ movement is discernible, on others, togetherness almost dissolves in colourful abstractions. The movements and intentions are good and loving, but drab and monotonous.
The act is about keeping something alive, but it can be difficult to be spontaneous- ly aware in a situation that one has been present in many times before, and that over time has taken on its own rehearsed predictability.
The sexual act becomes a mess of entangled contorted limbs in a impenetrable chaos of love and bodies, melting together in alternating moments of synchronicity and division like two objects of flesh out of sync.

Malou da Cunha Bang (b. 1982 Denmark) often works with grotesque reinterpretations of expe- rienced situations. Memories and moods are translated into motifs of awkward encounters and absurd scenes between people in series of graphic prints. It is an attempt to exhaust the nausea- ting, awkward or incomprehensible through scenes that at once feel familiar and alienating. She graduated from the Royal Art Academy in Stockholm in 2016.

Julie Falk (DK)
Julie Falk presents the installation Security consisting of two sculptures and a con- tribution for Mads Juels’ publication Bella Fortuna Magazine. The sculptures linger at the margins of the gallery space trying to detect and protect the space we are in. They refer to what surrounds them, working as a support structure for the space they inhabit, pointing to something that lies outside themselves.

Julie Falk (b. 1991, Copenhagen) works in an intersection between concept and sculpture, where everyday elements are combined or merged with materials from a context of sculptural produc- tion. It’s a physical language investigating the affective potential of objects and how they affect us.
Julie is currently based in Copenhagen and holds a MFA from Malmö Art Academy.

Mads Juel (DK)
Mads Juel’s contribution consists of two photographic pieces. One that is meant to resemble a waiting room interior, and the other an emergency exit sign. It also consists of the publication Bella Fortuna Magazine; a mash-up of different types of reading material that all could be found in a public waiting room.

Mads Juel (b. 1990, Copenhagen) is working in an ongoing dialogue between analogue, colour pho- tography and a text-based practise, where the main focus is on the link between nature and the body as a sensory apparatus. He is currently researching how the relation between landscape and abstract photography can have a significant and perhaps even a political voice today. Mads holds an MFA from Malmö Art Academy and graduated in 2017.

Anne Langgaard (DK)
With humour, this piece is kept in an ambiguous balance between the poetic ex- pression Grief is the price of love and the bronze cast of a cardboard box wine - a bag-in-box.
The piece is in a sense carefree in its reference to alcohol and emotions, and at the same time it postulates that grief is a part of being human.

Grief is connected to loss, and my artistic practice is often about freezing a moment in time, in order to escape this loss and eternalising it. To be careless is just as utopian as wanting to capture a moment in time.

Anne Langgaard (b. 1973 in Copenhagen) turns our attention to the objects we are surrounded by in our everyday lives and usually don’t see or give a thought. With humor and poetry and an interest in the imperfect, she transforms the everyday objects into a sort of still images of lived life. She tries to break with familiar categories to change our view of things. She studied BA Fine Art (Hons) at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London 2011-13.

Helene Manaa-Vestergaard (DK)
Lightshow is an appropriated motif, a former mural at Sydhavn Station.
Here, the motif is painted on turquoise mother-of-pearl plastic tablecloth, colla- ged with elements of shiny cardboard strips. The template for this painting is digital and fetched from my picture diary, an archive I continuously update with photos of glimpses and impressions of my daily life, inviting me to dream and fable on about them.

Helene Vestergaard (b. 1991 in Copenhagen) works with collage techniques in her paintings to bring together motifs in a surreal, feministic universe where the uncanny in interior objects and settings is portrayed. Fragments from the artist’s everyday life are put together in seemingly illogical and enigmatic collages. Vestergaard graduated in 2018 from The Funen Art Academy and held solo and group exhibitions in Denmark, Italy and NYC, USA.

Camilla Rasborg (DK)
I have transformed discarded drawers into face reliefs. They seem to look at us from their vantage point of lost domestic function, and I gave them titles according to what I imagine they could tell us from their new place in this world. To discover meaning in and make sense of random forms and figures is known as the psycho- logical phenomenon Pareidolia. Our perception creates order out of accidental occurrences and chaos, and provides us with something we can recognise. Since we are social beings, it is often faces we see.

The artistic practice of Camilla Rasbog (b. 1974 Denmark) is focused on discarded and disposed material. Through an intuitive process she brings new life to readily available things that would oth- erwise be considered useless. She traces their remnants and transforms them from abandonment to artworks, with artistic gestures revealing them as paintings, reliefs, or collages. Camilla Rasborg graduated from The Jutland Academy of Fine Arts in 2002.

Anne Skole Overgaard (DK)
I have painted motifs from Sorgenfri on ceramic plates. The German-Swedish ar- chitect Fritz Jaenecke designed the buildings in the 1950 ́s in a radical form of mo- dernism that was rooted both in German expressionist architecture and a strong Swedish modernist tradition. The beautiful gables remind me of a big geometric painting, and I felt like painting the square motif on a round ceramic plate. The plates and the watercolour paint stir up nostalgic memories of the old days and of decorative items in my grandparents’ home. Today, the 1950’s are already the old days, so maybe the building we stand in, here in Sorgenfri, is a concrete example of a precedent vision of how to build a better future. The 50’s’ questioning of what kind of future we are creating - and if it will be a better future, has perhaps gained a renewed concern

Anne Skole Overgaard (b. 1980, Denmark) is painting the world around her with an almost surreal accuracy. She focuses on the detail and lets herself get absorbed and fascinated by the pictures- que. Lately roses in various stages of bloom, have been the motif of her large watercolours, but also houses and everyday environments have been a recurring subject. Anne Skole Overgaard gradua- ted from the Jutland Academy of Fine Arts in 2006

Hartmut Stockter (DE)
Portable Rat-Converter is an offer to rats that can enter the showcase using a footbridge. Inside, they are invited to fasten a tail to their backsides and leave again, seemingly turned into squirrels.

Honeytick
Fortunately, it is now possible to implant honeybee-genes into ticks, which enables them to fly from flower to flower and collect pollen. The ticks wich had previously been condemned to lead a parasitic life, can now follow the virtuous path of dili- gence.

Hartmut Stockter (b. 1973 in Wilhelmshaven, Germany) Many of Hartmut Stockter’s sculptures take on the form of day trip equipment, made for use in the landscape. They are handmade devices, apparently assembled in the workshop of an inventive craftsman. The main focus is our relation to plants and animals, as well as natural forces and elements. Hartmut Stockter studied in Hannover and Braunschweig (Germany) and Bergen (Norway).

SE
I bostadsområdet runt Galleri CC står åtta billboards, så att utställningen även kan upplevas i Sorgenfris offentliga rum. Sonja Lillebæk Christensens fyra billboards tar avstamp i de byggnader som omger galleriet och som är formade av modernismens ideal. De ville skapa ett bättre samhälle genom rationella, geometriska och hygie- niska hem med solljus och gröna omgivningar. Hon frågar om människor kan leva i en utopi - och om utopier kan leva i människor. På fyra andra billboards har Aske Thiberg återskapat sovrum i 3D, som tillhör ungdomar som isolerat sig från samhäl- let genom att inte lämna sina hem under längre perioder. Han har stött på dem i ett europeiskt chattrum online, där de kallar sig själva för ”hikis” vilket kommer från det japanska ordet “Hikikomori” vilket betyder: Att fängsla sig själv.

EN
Eight billboards are placed in the residential area surrounding Galleri CC, so the exhibition also can be experienced in the public space of the Sorgenfri neighbour- hood as well as in the exhibition space. Sonja Lillebæk Christensen focuses on the local apartment blocks with her four billboards. Shaped by modernism’s ideal of creating a better society through rational, geometric and hygienic homes with sunlight and green surroundings, Lillebæk Christensen questions whether humans can live in such a utopia - and whether utopias can live within us humans. On the remaining four billboards, Aske Thiberg has made a 3D rendering of rooms belong- ing to young people who have isolated themselves from society by locking them- selves inside their room for extended periods of time. Aske connected with the young people in a European chat room, where they refer to themselves as ”Hikis” deriving from the Japanese word for “self-imprisonment”.



Sonja Lillebæk Christensen (DK)
The banners show recognizable forms reminiscent of the sur- rounding buildings, human body parts and four basic geometric forms.
In visual arts, the four basic geometric forms are “relicts” from modernism, when utopias were grand, and the belief in creating one’s own expression was firm. One wanted to make a difference in the world – with rational, geometric and hygienic housing for the broad public.

These geometric forms belong to mathematics that can be in- serted into a spread sheet, where there should be a clear solu- tion to the arithmetic problem. Such clear solutions are some- what harder to find when it comes to humans and our bodies and souls that are shaped by experience.

Sonja Lillebæk Christensen (b. 1972, Denmark) works with video and posters. She draws on a do- cumentary interest - but at the same time she plays with the point of view of a both voyeuristic and questioning person. She cultivates a taste for the everyday, those events that we might not notice or be aware of but which nevertheless contain social, cultural and poetic significance. Sonja Lil- lebæk Christensen graduated from The Jutland Academy of Fine Arts in 2003

Aske Thiberg (SE/DK)
Four bedrooms reconstructed in 3D animation, using pictures and conversations in a chatroom online for youth who have voluntarily isolated themselves from society by staying inside for long periods of time. Each work/room is named after the user it belongs to.

Aske Thiberg (SE/DK) (b. 1994, Stockholm) is a Swedish and Danish artist, based in Copenhagen, where he is currently doing his MFA in Fine Arts. His work consists of animated videos and text, in which 3D scanned characters in isolated digital spaces form the scenery where inner thought and dreams are expressed and explored. Loneliness, aggression and self obsession are some of the reoccurring themes.