Published by Leonardo Calcagno
University of Copenhagen
Anders Weberg
HERE ALL ALONE
June 3–7 2015
the white factory
Novozymes Hillerødgade 35-37
2200 Copenhagen N
Denmark
HERE ALL ALONE, a total installation of sound and video art in the white factory at Nørrebro, is the first solo show by Swedish artist Anders Weberg in Denmark. The exhibition unfolds through large-scale responsive sound and video installations, and other media installations involving push notifications and surveillance cameras.
The current condition in Copenhagen is one of growing insecurity and alienation, where recent violent events have intensified the anxieties of a fear-focused world. We find ourselves here, in the abandoned enzymes factory, confronted with the feeling of being in an emotionally desolated world—all alone. Inside the factory, a fragment of the city is transitioned from the world of the concrete, productive and real into the realm of the fictional. The artist Anders Weberg invites us to explore the factory through various aesthetic entry points that confront the dystopian consequences of a fear-focused world.
The exhibition raises the overall question: How do we relate to being actors in a culture of decaying trust and increasing alienation?
Walking through the factory, the audience will experience various embodied encounters with the installations that mirror how we engage with the world in a mediated reality increasingly conditioned by surveillance, feedback from invisible computing and overlays of virtual realities. Remote audiences may experience the exhibition live via surveillance cameras during the opening hours of the exhibition.
The installation continues Anders Weberg’s examination of identity construction in a contemporary context, through site-specific video explorations of urban textures and layers of meaning. Through the mediating optics of a mobile device, the lens through which we increasingly experience the world, the artist brings the audience on an aesthetic journey behind the material surface of the factory and underneath an emotional skin of our cultural condition of anxiety, fear and alienation.
The artist is not leaving out hope that this condition can be cured. Mirrored in the aura of a factory once producing medicine for curing us physically and psychically we are invited to explore a potentially curative, emotional response to our uncanny status quo via the responsive dimension of the installations, developed by the artist duo NULEINN.
“I have tried to remake this place, filled with so much history, into a multi installation, where the images, sound and the place itself blend together and invite the visitor for a seamless emotional roller coaster, which in some ways is controlled by themselves,” says Anders Weberg.
With thematic departure in Weberg’s work, an audio walk, written and spoken by writer Benedicte Gui de Thurah Huang, guides the audience on a narrated tour through the labyrinth spaces of the old factory.
Symposium: June 12
Following the exhibition, the symposium “Critical Aesthetics in Urban Digital Art” continues a conversation on curatorial concerns, critical discourses and the urgent potential of urban digital art, presenting Maurice Benayoun, Anders Weberg and Kassandra Wellendorf, moderated by Tanya Toft. Read more here.
HERE ALL ALONE is curated by Tanya Toft.
SOURCE: e-flux.com