E-Flux Press Release

For The Present and The Future sections of The Garden – End of Times, Beginning of Times, contemporary artists working within a range of different media have been invited to explore the garden as a space. Through site-specific installations, video, sound, painting, and sculpture, The Present and The Future open up to a variety of voices and perspectives on the garden, and nature in general, as sites of contradiction marked with complex cultural differences in terms of both conception and perception. See the page of works in the town.

Stretching along the coastline from Tangkrogen to Ballehage, artists insert nature in a narrative of symbolic and historic meaning, exploring both its materiality and mythology.

 

 

International Archives 1st half of 2017

The ARos Triennale, The Present & The Future

Aarhus’ coastline (Denmark)

03.06 - 30.07.2017

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Bjarke Ingels Group, Skum

BIG has created a mobile structure which functions as a social framework, travelling from the Tuborg Bar at Roskilde Festival and Chart Art Fair in 2016 and, finally, to The Garden – End of Times, Beginning of Times. The ambition is to create a social space for ‘plug and play’. The design of the pavillon, named SKUM, recalls a childlike love of tranpolines and bouncy castles. The large bubble-like cloud ofters 120 square metres for guests to relax and enjoy the scenery. At night, the LEDs are programmed to illuminate the pavillon from both the inside and the outside, creating an enormous bubble of light.

Anssi Pulkkinene & Taneli Rautiainen, Constrainder view (Gap), Fountain)

The work has captured a view over the Øresund Bridge via Google Earth. The artificial disruption in the satellite images is stretched across a commercial sign and displayed against the coastline horizon. Above the seashore, a passenger car has been suspended in the air. The sea water is pouring out the vehicule’s doors and openings in a constant flow. The elements play with a classical fountain motif, building on a vast tradition of nature and architecture. They are elements of disruption in an organised world – glimpses of disarray.

Superflex, Investment Bank Flowerpots / Deutsche Bank Henbane

Deutsche Bank Henbane is part of the series Investment Bank Flowerpots, models of corporate head quartier buildings operated by the world’s 20 largest investment banks. Each model serves as a flower pot to the combiation of bank and plant. In ths work, Deutsche Bank is scated and planted with henbane, a pssychoactive plant notorious for its use in ‘magic brews’ throughout history. Deutsche Bank Henbane is a conflation of uncontrollable economic growth and the banking industry’s hallucinatory fixation on investment opportunity.

Alicja Kwade, Be-Hide

The piece consists of two stones separarted by a mirror. One being a real boulder, the other stone is, in fact, an aluminium cast printed using a modern 3D scanning technique. The work is changing the truth of a familiar natural object and, depending on the position of the viewer, it appears to be a magic mirror, a door to another reality where the stones appear to be made out of metal. Kwade is using the double theme repeating as she connects it to a reflection upon a different reality.

Katharina Grosse, Untitled

With sprayed acrylic colours, Grosse creates an expansive multi-layered paintoing stretching across Strandvejen and the lower part of the city park Mindeparken in Aarhus. Her imagination  of the natural in form of a painting leads to rethink our views of the garden as idealised nature. By sending the fluid perception of painting through the ordered hierarchy of landscape and street dynamics, Grosse treats the suburban surroundings as a field of unlimited possibilities. It influences how we look at society and politics, at ourselves, you, them, it.

Tomás Saraceno, NGC/IC/M+M

Tomás Saraceno’s work draws inspiration from art, architecture, science, and nature. His work paves the way to a new future where mankind can live in symbiosis with the earth beyond geographical and political borders. In  NGC/IC/M+M, he draws on architectural design and natural geometry, disconnecting viewers from their hackneyed mindset. Instead, it offers an introduction to structures and patterns that force us to think about alternative lifestyles and modes of getting about on Earth. In this way, the sculpture extends the imagination and evokes dreams of a future away from limitation and back to nature.

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Nikolaus Hirsch, Michel Müller, Do We Dream Under the Same Sky

The project Do We Dream Under the Same Sky is created by the artist Rirkit Tiravanija, and the architects Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Müller. Designed as a pavilion, the modular structure encourages the public to engage in debatesn talks, screenings, performances, and cooking. This work can be seen as a disembodled extension of the futureeeee artist residence at The Land, a self-sustaining artistic community initiated by Rirkit Tiravanija and Kamin Lertchaiprasert near Chiang Mai at Thailand, proposing an artistic utopia and presenting an ecological and sustainable model for future pratice.

Meg Webster, Concave room for bees

The work is constructed using 300 cubic yards of fertile soil and covered with robust plantings of native grasses, flowers, and herbs. The piece has both a sculptural and ecological dimension, highlighting the complex interactions of organic systems. Webster has created a multi-sensory artwork, a mix of aromas, insects, and vibrantly coloured flora. For Webster, soil is a potent component of a dynamic and exquisite ecological system that provides sustenance for the inhabitants of this planet. The installation calls for a response to an urgent ecological crisis: a decline in pollinators.

Henrik Menné, Skovanordning

Henrik Menné takes a broad view of processes and change and incorporates them into his installations. He pairs single materials with machines that undergo repetitive motions so that the objects get warped and moulded over time. Skovanordning is a machine built by the artist, producing organic objects all trhough the exhibition period. The objects consist of different kinds of organic liquids appearing in the shape of a big flower or mushroom. After the machine has finished one object, it must be moved and a new production process will begin.

Max Hooper Schneider, Refuse Refugium

In their pyramidal mausoleum, the materials are entombed in a city grave, but only to slowly hange and decay  ; they have not been assembled for perpetual preservation or nostalgic contemplation, but as an exhibition of nature reworking itself – i.e. in the form of humaan productions becoming nature’ruins. While its pyramidal form is suggestive of the folly-architecture of a tomb, the work is oriented towards the future and the event that a garden ultimately is  : a site of unceasing transformation and mutation, of rot and regeneration, ruin and resurrection.

Tue Greenfort, Prototaxites

Aesthetically straightforward and with a clarity of form, the works of Tue Greenfort often reflect complex contexts and connections and are based on extensive research into specific places, a particular material, or a real condition. The work Prototaxites incorporates a number of sculptures which, in terms of shape, refer to a type of fungus-like organisms that inhabited the Earth 3-400 million years ago. This was a time when no large land-living animals were yet in existence. Thses primal mushrooms named Prototaxites were large columnar structures measuring above six meters in height.

Simon Starling, One Hundred and Seventy-Five

One Hundred and Seventy-Five continues a series of works which Simon Starling has made in collaboration with Japanese craftspeople – in the case working in the age-old tradition of Urushi (Japanese lacquer). The characteristic shiny black or red lacquer is produced from tree sap happed from the trunk of a Toxicodendron vernicifluum tree by creating a series of distinctive parralel cuts in the bark. Such a tree has been meticulously coated with layers of the hand black protective lacquer, its dark scarred trunk becoming an exotic broodin figurative presence among the indigenous Danish flora.

Hans Rosenström, Shoreline

Hans Rosenström works with site specific installations addressing viewers psychological and physical relationship with specific moments and/or spaces. He uses a wide variety of media and materials, including sound, text, lights, and constructed elements. The work Shoreline emphasises the presence of the viewer and a piece is not complete until it has been experienced by viewers. A shoreline symbolises reflection on the nature of change and transformation through personal narratives.

Sarah Sze, Untitled

Since the late 1990s, Sarah Sze has developed a signature visual langage that challenges the static nature of sculpture. Sze draws from modernist traditions of the found object, dismantling that authority with dynamic constellations of materials that are charged with flux, transformation, and fragility. Captured in this suspension, her immersive and intricate works question both the value society places on objects and how objects ascribe meaning to the places and times we live in.

 

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