Exhibition

Revisit: Hanne Nielsen & Birgit Johnsen

10 Nov 2018 – 6 Jan 2019

Event times

Tuesday-Sunday 1-5pm, Thursday 1-8pm

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Overgaden. Institute of Contemporary Art

Copenhagen, Denmark

Address

Travel Information

  • 2A, 350S, 19, 47 and 66 directly to Christianshavn Torv
  • M1 og M2, Christianshavn
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About

This year the series culminates with a large-scale presentation of the work of Hanne Nielsen and Birgit Johnsen. The artist duo are among the leading exponents of video art in Denmark, and with this version of REVISIT Overgaden provides an opportunity to explore their long-standing and uncompromising investigation of the medium of video.

The background for the exhibition is the video installation Territorielle udsagn(‘Territorial Statements’), which was exhibited at Overgaden in 2002 and drew a lot of attention when it was made due to its experimental use of video. In the work, six women describe an episode in their lives where they felt their boundaries were transgressed, an episode they recount four separate times over several days. During the course of the work small changes in the women’s tone, choice of words and thoughts are registered – one even ends up reviewing her story and changing her mind during the process – just as the lighting, camera angle and framing vary from session to session. Via formal and narrative shifts the work engages the viewer in a dialogue on the criteria we use to judge the authenticity of what we see, as well as the role the medium and our expectations of it play in our determination of veracity.

Its critical dispute with reality and the medium of video has made Territorielle udsagna cardinal point in the work of Nielsen and Johnsen. So when Overgaden brings the REVISIT series to a close with an exhibition based on this work here in 2018, the focus is specifically on how the artists create narratives. Divided into four sections, the exhibition follows key trajectories in their work under the titles ‘Technological Meditations’, ‘Montages of Reality’, ‘The Punctured Climax’ and ‘The Dissolution of the Fourth Wall’. Each section presents a selection of new and older works charting continuity and developments within each respective area of focus, while also providing a survey of the thematic scope of their work in which identity, gender and global politics are recurrent topics.

For the exhibition Hanne Nielsen and Birgit Johnsen have created Modern Escape, a new installation unfolding at the intersection of a constant media news stream and the private sphere. Orchestrated as a landscape of moving images, sound, light and moving objects, a changing environment of fragments that have to be pieced together is created as the viewer navigate the work’s complex layers of events and interwoven time and space.

Exhibiting artistsToggle

Hanne Nielsen

Birgit Johnsen

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