Sidsel Meineche Hansen: An Artist’s Guide to Stop Being an Artist

Sidsel Meineche Hansen’s practice focuses on the industrial complex that connects virtual and robotic bodies with human labour in the pharmaceutical, pornographic, and tech industries. An Artist Guide to Stop Being an Artist continues this line of enquiry, with particular focus on the external and internal mechanisms that control the production and reproduction of artistic labour.

The exhibition at the National Gallery of Denmark (SMK) is centred on the installation Difficult to work with?, 2019, which include the sculptural work Untitled, 2018, in combination with a new locking system for the gallery space. Untitled is a life-sized ball-jointed figure, with orifices that are compatible with oral and vaginal inserts made in silicone, which are sold for current sex dolls on the market. For the exhibition at SMK, the sculpture’s immobile mechanical body is combined with a video based mobile app visible on a mobile phone in the sculpture’s hand and on a screen on the wall above the figure. The app features an animated avatar that functions as the sculpture’s mouth piece. In the video animation, the head of the wooden sculpture is superimposed with a recording of the artist’s eyes and mouth, delivering a monologue entitled An Artist Guide to Stop Being an Artist, 2019. The script, which appropriates Alan Carr’s self-help guide Easy Way to Stop Smoking, instead discusses the artist’s dilemma of wanting to make art while wanting to quit it as a profession. 

The x-room is SMK’s platform for contemporary art where international artists are invited to show new works created especially for this space. This exhibition is co-produced with Kunsthal Aarhus and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.


Thank you to the Obel Family Foundation for generous support to the x-room.