Haegue Yang, Double Soul, National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen
This past spring and summer the National Gallery of Denmark’s main sculpture hall and exhibition galleries were transformed into a sphere for all the senses where light, movement, and sound became bodies made of craft accessories that jingled, dangled, and swirled. Clusters of potential power, yet profound in their insistent physicality. The museum guards were their wardens, who could awaken the sleeping giants for viewers upon request. Some of the sculptures woke themselves and doused unsuspecting bystanders with a sensuous musk as they passed into a room filled with moving shadows. The works transgressed borders and time, intertwining personal and political memory.
Lynn Hershman Leeson, The Electronic Diaries (1984–2019), Simian, Copenhagen
Hidden in the subterranean bowels of a never completed bicycle garage, Simian presented six video stations, each with a bench and a large video projection. Like the Stations of the Cross, Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Electronic Diaries was a journey of deep personal disclosure. It grabbed me and kept me in its grip through its passionate of confessions of body dysmorphia, guilt, and abandonment to growing strength and awareness of our complex relationship with the screen and how it distorts. Leeson’s confrontation with her own mortality (brain tumour treatment and recovery) goes on to confront moral questions surrounding DNA modification, the control of women’s bodies and narratives, and how to bring power and agency to the less powerful.
Ejnar Nielsen, Signs of Life, The Hirschsprung Collection, Copenhagen
Filled with suffering and tinged with hope and attention to nature and detail, these paintings felt deeply contemporary. This may have to do with what is happening in the world at the moment. Ejnar Nielsen’s (1872–1956) keen and intimate look at illness, suffering, loss, and vulnerability was presented with reverence and dignity. In his 1907 portrait of his friend, the Swedish author Ellen Key, we get the deep satisfaction of an epiphanic meeting between abstraction and realistic detail. Man and Woman (1917–1919), on loan from the National Gallery of Denmark, gave me chills as I considered that the vulnerable bodies of these two naked individuals trapped in a theatrical icon of ideology were painted at the time of the terrible pogroms of the Russian Civil War and the first fight for Ukrainian independence.
Yvette Brackman is an artist living in Copenhagen. She is currently a NovoNordisk Postdoctoral Fellow in Practice-based Artistic Research at the National Gallery of Denmark. From 2000 to 2007 she was professor and head of the School of Walls and Space at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine at in Copenhagen.
For this year’s contributions to Kunstkritikk’s Advent Calendar, see here.
