Imagine 500 solar powered plastic bugs ordered from different factories in China, 9 framed portraits of real estate agents culled from the internet and a poster repurposing the logo from the club night Ants at Ushuaïa in Ibiza. Sculpture and photograph and poster, bugs and houses and dancing, toys and the housing crisis and entertainment, factory work and portraits and horror, commodities and images and advertisements, fossil fuel and art and leisure, global warming and representation and swarm intelligence, sustainability and gatekeepers and vacation, plastic and appearance and style, scale and surface and sound, automaton and profession and coat of arms, solar powered plastic bugs and portraits of real estate agents and clubbing on Ibiza.[1]
[1] Nina Beier, Simon Dybbroe Møller, excerpt of PROTEIN, July 2023
Dates: July 21 to October 21
Times: Thursday to Saturday, from 10 am to 2 pm. Evenings by appointment (info@ses12naus.org).
Location: La Carpintería. Carrer Riu Arno, 58 (Can Bufí)
Supported by:
Simon Dybbroe Møller (Denmark - 1976) thinks with and through things. In his practice he digs for objects that are sort of blurry. Or rather perhaps, suspended in a kind of limbo between different conditions; objects frozen in a state of transitioning between disparate modes of existence. He is interested in objects and images that seem to have almost invented themselves, in such a way that - in his own words - they act as “nonverbal articulations of our collective subconscious”. In his photographic work he investigates the relationship between the most fundamental sensate experiences and the increasing remove and autonomy of representational media. In other words Møller's practice centers around the question of how we change media and how media changes us.
Simon Dybbroe Møller has had solo exhibitions at Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Fondazione Giuliani in Rome, Kunsthalle Sao Paulo, 21er Haus in Vienna, Kunstverein Hannover, Frankfurter Kunstverein, among others. His work was included in the 5th Moscow Biennial, the 2nd Turin Triennial and the 9th Berlin Biennial and in group exhibitions at MOCA Detroit; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; SMK National Gallery, Copenhagen; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, and Kunstverein München. Since 2019, Dybbroe Møller has been a professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts' Sculpture School; he organizes the performance series Why Words Now and, together with Nina Beier, runs the exhibition space AYE-AYE.Nina Beier (Denmark - 1975) works with found objects whose value has been shaped collectively across different time periods, generations or global realities. Hybrid and unstable, the selected objects are elastic motifs that are forever mutating in a continuous state of transformation. Following an interest in objects that carry narratives about the fundamental power structures which our society is built on, Beier’s work digs into cultural codes that are particularly layered and contradictory. Her sculptures unpack the space between the intention, production, distribution, trading and use of her selected material and explores how these factors have changed over time.
Nina Beier has presented solo exhibitions at Rønnebæksholm, Denmark; Spike Island, Bristol, England; Kunstverein Hamburg, Germany; Contemporary Art Centre, Lithuania; Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland; Kunsthall Charlottenborg, Denmark; the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, California; Mudam, Luxembourg; Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Group shows include Kunsthaus Zürich, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Maxxi in Rome, Power Station of Art in Shanghai, Center Pompidou in Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit, Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin and the Hammer Museum in LA. Nina Beier lives and works in Copenhagen, where she runs the exhibition space AYE-AYE together with Simon Dybbroe Møller.Elise Lammer is a curator and the artistic director of Halle Nord, Geneva. She is currently a PhD candidate at Institute Art Gender Nature in Basel, and University Linz, Austria, researching the garden of British artist, filmmaker, author and gay rights activist Derek Jarman (UK, 1942-1994). Since 2019, she’s been developing a garden in homage to Jarman's Prospect Cottage at La Becque | Artists Residency, La Tour-de-Peilz, where she assembled an archive of bootleg material aimed at raising awareness around Jarman's legacy.