BUILDING

 ARTISTS :            

BUILDING was the second in the exhibition series ‘Common Ground’. It took the term Building loosely as a framework to think through and with and explored methods of sharing space and working together. ‘Common Ground’ focusesed on the Sorgenfri industrial area around the gallery that is characterised by ongoing gentrification and governmental cuts to the arts. In this context, the exhibition highlighted the role that buildin

g using physical materials plays in contributing to new communities, to gather, invent and survive through culture.

Kåre Frang’s seemingly fragile Digestive cookies sculptures spring from a deeply rooted interest in how people relate to and get attached to things, and how the notion of ownership transforms anything into something potentially precious, identity-creating and somehow irreplaceable. The series started when the artist was working with his child in his studio, while schools were closed during the recent pandemic. In a creative and intimate situation, the two tried to make sense of the world by making sculptures that replicate various objects from their surroundings out of sweet biscuits. The works embody a balance between chaos, precision and fragility as equal elements that are placed in a line, almost as if they were depicting a sentence.

Wilfred Wagner’s work, Compositors and Devils, is likewise an arrangement, a composition of tablets that are collected together as a set, shown in the process of becoming and being a set. The image of a steam automaton typesetter, imagined in the 1800s

, is working tirelessly to reduce the workload of humans but this workload has already been offset. In printing workshops throughout history there are known to be typesetting-devils (Setternisse) that cause mistakes in the printing process.

The process of printing a vinyl decal involves creating digital vector graphics in a precise process, but then once it is applied to the surface it becomes a hands-on process prone to human error or influence from any setting-devils. The work appears as printed decals on magnetic boards; these two functional mediums, one used in advertising or signage and the other as a notice board, come together to betray functionality and remain permanently temporary.

The seven miniature carts that occupied the floor and the whole exhibition space are a collaboration between Sindri Leifsson andartists he invited, beginning with Martina Priehodová as the start of a chain-letter invitation process, followed by Sturla Magnússon and Lily Dollner, Kristyan Nicholson, Aske Hyldborg and Emil Sandström, and Marjike Klamer. The trailer structures that Sindri Leifsson made are inspired by carts often seen o

utside homes in Reykjavík, Iceland. Those are often filled with discarded materials, objects that had served their purpose or were no longer needed in their functions, all in a state of transformation. At Celsius Projects, the miniature carts were filled with artworks, where one’s works of art become the carriers of other works and ideas of others.

In their own ways, all of the works found in the exhibition shared being carriers of histories, carriers of dialogues and co-creation and all of them contribute to the wish to build new communities and to tell new stories. They celebrate the potentialities of co-creation and that working together enables building something that can be larger than ownership.

Arranged by Francis Patrick Brady, Elísabet Anna Kristjánsdóttir and Janneke Schoene.

Photo credit: Elísabet Anna Kristjánsdóttir