Autumn 2011
Simon Starling
Nina Beier
Research Programme
Preview:
6 October 2011
Nyhavn 2
1051 Copenhagen
Denmark
www.kunsthalcharlottenborg.dk
Simon Starling
This exhibition features two major works by Simon Starling, one of them a newly commissioned puppet play written by the artist and staged in a replica of a local marionette theatre. The Expedition is the latest in a group of works in which Starling has transplanted buildings and environments in order to play with space and time. The drama is a distorted re-staging of four of Starling’s previous pieces—each of which involved building, demolishing and sailing in boats—which are here combined into a single slapstick narrative complete with a puppet version of the artist.
The exhibition also features an installation, Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima), 2010, which centres on a group of carved Japanese Noh masks that represent the characters in a play. The scenario is based on an ancient Japanese story, but Starling has peopled this tale with figures from a Cold War saga based around the British sculptor Henry Moore and his real and fictional contemporaries—including art collectors, historians and spies. Starling’s installation weaves together the stories of Moore’s sculpture, and of a strange meeting of English, American and Japanese cultures.
Nina Beier
This is Nina Beier’s first major exhibition in the Scandinavian region and consists mainly of new work. One piece is a large-scale triptych, which consists of secondhand clothes—made from leopard-skin prints and other animal patterns—held within picture frames. Other works involve posters, which have been a recurring feature in Beier’s art. A final piece features a Persian carpet scattered with dog hair, the latter stemming from a repeated performance in which a dog owner asks their pet to ‘play dead’ on the rug.
Beier’s practice explores the curious connections between images and objects, and between artistic display and value. Fur and its representation is a recurring subject within the exhibition, which looks in particular at notions of exoticism and exchange, and at the relationship of art to consumerism, fashion and obsolescence.
Research Programme
The autumn Research Programme is organised by Dieter Roelstraete, who will be in residence in Copenhagen, taking part in a number of events and working on a series of poems and critical commentaries that has occupied him for several years. Roelstraete’s programme is taking shape in close collaboration with his interlocutor in poetic matters, the American artist Jason Dodge.
Supporters and credits
The Simon Starling exhibition is curated by Mark Sladen and is supported by The Danish Arts Council, Grosserer L.F. Foghts Fond and Neugerriemschneider. Additional thanks to the National Workshops for Arts and Crafts and the Rennie Collection.
The Nina Beier exhibition is curated by Rhea Dall and is supported by The Danish Arts Council.
Photograph of Simon Starling’s Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima) courtesy of the Rennie Collection, Neugerriemschneider and the Modern Institute. Work originally commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima. Photo: Ruth Clark. Image shows a mask, made by Yasuo Miichi, for the character of Kumasaka (modeled on Joseph Hirshhorn).
