Dear Agnes
Early on, I understood that your work would be about queues – about the act of queueing up, and about using queues as a mechanism of control and regulation as well as a demonstration of power. I believe you have succeeded in that. Based on sketches of prefab barrier tapes stretched from wall to wall, you created a network of actual lines across the gallery space – lines meant to both lead and mislead the movements and the gaze of the audience.
“A line is a line, is a line, is a line” – it’s as if the line is chasing its own tail. To me, the repetition in the work title, with its monotone rhythm, sounds both like a passivating mantra that supports the patient waiting in line, and like a confronting recognition of stagnation, almost encouraging one to step out of the line. This resonates quite well with your description of the idea of queuing being a tense choreography, balancing between the expectation of control and the possibility of its collapse.
Text excerpts from queue manuals and private video recordings of people standing in line suggest that behind the order and control that we associate with queue etiquette, an underlying chaos is always lurking. They also show how queuing can anonymize us – we become part of a crowd, reduced to our place in the line, and yet the queue system often exposes and upholds coded hierarchies.
As in several of your earlier works, your interest lies in complex and ambiguous societal structures, which you explore with a particular eye for staging imitating reality. It’s fascinating how, in your art, you turn everyday materials and codes into tools for artistic inquiry. You skillfully connect the body, urban structures, and nature, especially when investigating places and geographies. And as I see it, you often display an underlying critical gaze in your artistic approach, one directed at capitalism and political control. I encourage you to continue down that road.
Sincerely,
Tijana
Dear William
Rostrum, landscape, peep box – that is what I wrote in my notebook after our meeting in March when we spoke about what your graduation work would contain. Rostrum, landscape, peep box: it almost sounds like a Dadaist poem or list of elements in a surrealist painting where chance is the guiding creative principle. But even though par hasard is a legitimate artistic method, I could not shake the feeling that your work retains an underlying logic – particularly through its cohesive aesthetic, which binds the elements into a unified whole. It seems like your intention is to keep the viewer in that exact in-between space: where, on the one hand, one is inclined to decode the meaning of the work, and, on the other, one is forced to surrender to the incomprehensible, and accept the openness of the piece.
Another feature of your art – which you have used in several of your earlier works as well – is, of course, scale dislodgement. It seems that the coexistence of different perspectives is essential to you – hat a full-size rostrum can stand up to a miniature landscape. Your poetic universe displays your true talent for twisting our ideas of the typical and transforming standardized motifs into curious and peculiar elements.
I believe poetry is important to you – and that is why you cherish the enigmatic. Not because you want to be a cryptic artist whose works require deciphering in a particular and complicated manner, but rather because you want the audience to have an open and spontaneous encounter with your work.
I find that deeply poetic.
Sincerely,
Tijana
Dear Amalie
From your portfolio of previous works, I can tell that your skills span across many different media.
In connection with your graduation project, your focus has been particularly on amateur photographs of used objects. And even though you’re not working with photographs you have taken yourself, but rather with images collected from others, your practice still appears deeply photographic to me. This is partly because your interest lies not only in the subject of the image, but equally in the photographer’s relationship to that subject – something you have acquired from the photograph’s aesthetic.
In your series, the subjects are used objects, photographed by their owners as they shift context – either from a private home to a public digital marketplace, or from one family member to another.
The photographs, thus, become a kind of documentation and visual testimony of the journey of the objects – a journey that transforms their value. Either as sentimental value converted into market value, or as the subjective meanings and significances assigned by the previous owner are transformed once ownership changes. In other words, you’re exploring how both objects and photographs can serve as carriers and transmitters of values, memories, and subjectivity.
This kind of inquiry naturally leads you to work with collections – and here you are clearly consummate. You are both systematic and creative, which is indeed a strong combination when it comes to organizing and analyzing collected material. Moreover, there is something refreshing and inspiring in your approach to working with collections: the fact that in your search, you keep an open mind as to what you’re looking for. That method is essential – and may serve you well in working across all media.
Sincerely,
Tijana
Dear Sebastian
I remember when during our first meeting, I asked you what you wanted to do for the graduation exhibition, you replied that you wanted to create about 24 kindergarten children and four teachers visiting the art hall. And that is exactly what you did!
Your sculptures are figurative and life-sized, but far from hyper-realistic wax figures. Quite the opposite, they are crafted in a simple style clearly showing the handmade quality. The sculptures almost resemble 3D versions of children’s drawings – until they’re dressed in real-life clothes. The clothing adds a seriousness to the figures, completely transforming their expression, bringing them closer to reality.
I noticed that you often refer to the sculptures as dolls. I imagine there is something playful about shaping them, dressing them, painting their eyes, and giving them life. When I visited you in your studio, the dolls seemed almost alive. I think you enjoy their company – maybe they ease your loneliness.
Even though you prefer not to talking about what your works specifically mean, it is my impression that overall they express your own sensitivity to the relationship between the individual and society: On the one hand, the inner, personal universe where serenity, stability, and conscious presence form the basis for engaging with the world – and on the other, the communities we more or less voluntarily become part of.
Your graduation work represents exactly such a community – the kindergarten, an institution that shapes and prepares children to become good citizens. But your aim is not to criticize daycare institutions or the welfare state – that would be too direct for your artistic style. Instead, you simply present a situation allowing it to resonate with the audience’s own experiences and perspectives.
Your approach may seem naïve, like an idealized naïvist painting, but also realistic and honest, like a piece of social-realist cinema. I find your practice compelling, because it can be fixed somewhere between those two modes of expression.
I hope you’ll continue seeing art as a serious kind of game to play.
Sincerely,
Tijana
Dear Cecilie
Given your previous works, it doesn’t surprise me that you’ve chosen your own situation as a graduating student as the focal point of your artwork. It creates an intriguing loop that is not only about self-reflection but also an exploration of what happens when artist, artwork, and theme merge.
How does the audience experience the work when traditional definitions are dissolved? How do they navigate the tension between art and reality – or between the real and the fake? Here Bertolt Brecht comes to mind, that you yourself have referenced, especially his use of the Verfremdungseffekt – a method that challenges habitual ways of thinking by casting the everyday in a new light, or by breaking the illusion.
Beyond the performative element, your works also have a physical presence, as you often choose to exhibit objects. During a studio visit, we talked about how these objects function both as sculptural readymades and as props in a kind of scenography—for a performance that either has already taken place or has yet to begin. This duality is present in the graduation exhibition, where the objects not only represent or imitate but are taken directly from your concrete reality as a graduating student – from the Jutland Art Academy, where the work is created, and Kunsthal Aarhus, where it is exhibited. Once again, the loop is closed, while we are left questioning where reality ends and the artwork begins.
You are proficient at generating this sense of uncertainty and maintaining the tension between fiction and reality. You do it in a subtle and therefore all the more powerful way. I believe that you have created a unique space for faction – a blending of fact and fiction – that is well worth continuing to explore.
Sincerely
Tijana
Dear Tine
In one of your emails, you wrote that you are interested in identifying the density of absence. I find that both philosophically and poetically compelling.
Through your works, you uncompromisingly insist on focusing on what is not immediately visible: nothingness, emptiness, absence. For most, that might seem like a rather abstract task, but your approach is systematic and rational. You work hard and you are methodological. I have identified two methods in particular: one is about heaping up absence, the other about emptying out to make the void visible. Sometimes, you coat something over and over until it disappears into its own materiality – other times, you remove or erase something in order to reveal it.
Whether you’re deducting or adding, deconstructing or assembling, everything seems to revolve around stripping an object or a space of its conventional function – in order to uncover something else. Perhaps its pure form. Or its negative form. It’s fascinating to see what happens when function and purpose are removed or dissolved – when a space becomes a non-space or a storage unit is stripped of its intended purpose to store.
In the process, you document traces or remnants of repair and transformation in order to capture the ‘nothingness’ that preoccupies you. Some of the graphic works you have shown me are impressions of empty printing plates – they are beautiful because they show that emptiness is not necessarily empty, and that the absence of a motif can itself become a motif.
You are without a doubt a reflective and spatially-aware artist, and I look forward to following your future work. Your investigation of form and function – as well as their absence – is important because they challenge our logic and our conventional perception.
Sincerely,
Tijana
Dear Andrea
Ever since our first meeting, I have perceived you as an artist who is able to think with your body; it seems as though what you experience inside your body helps you understand what’s happening outside of it – and vice versa. At our meeting, you told me about bones, inflammation, and autoimmunity, but also about power structures, social norms, and self-organized education.
Later, you wrote to me about your graduation work and ‘shadow boxing’, which you described in reference both to fighting an invisible opponent and to wrapping fragile objects for protection during transport. Both the fight and the act of protection point to the body’s immune system, especially in those cases where, in trying to fight off illness, the body risks breaking down parts of itself.
I also remember that at one point we talked about ghosts and the invisible, and I am glad that in your graduation piece you chose to work with transparency and semi-transparency. The fact that the works are only barely visible creates a particular kind of distance as well as intimacy in how they are perceived – something that suits your practice very well.
The delicate and the fragile naturally play an important role in your work, because in many ways, your art is fundamentally about care. It is clear that there is a particular kind of uncompromising honesty in your artistic expression, in the way you make art, and in the way you are an artist. I hope you will hold on to that going forward, because it is a very brave approach – one that few are truly able to carry out.
Sincerely,
Tijana
