Parts
March 22–September 8, 2024
Looking at the biographies of commodities is at the centre of Nina Beier’s practice, tracing the various objectives that drive the transformation of extracted materials into fabricated products and practices. The found objects in her works carry heavy historical baggage accumulated by replicating and mutating across different geopolitical realities. Furthermore, socially constructed patterns and tropes are both intentionally and unconsciously transmitted and repeated, often fuelled by capitalism.
Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (Helsinki) is showing Nina Beier’s (b. 1975, Copenhagen) solo exhibition Parts, her most extensive in the Nordic countries to date. The vast open space of the museum is housing sculptures, installations, and a performance from her artistic practice of the past two decades. Series of works enter into dialogue with each other and the exhibition offers a view on to their repetitive nature and the meeting points between several object families. Meetings and collisions are embedded in Beier’s practice of bringing things and materials together. At Kiasma, the works are organized to form an assemblage, highlighting embodied experience of the world. When looked at, the exhibited objects turn into images: representations par excellence. In addition, instability is intrinsic to Beier’s sculptures. Movement and time passing are part of the lifecycle of the things that interest her. Even life on pause, a still life on display, tends to take on added symbolic value, or occasionally the allure may vanish and the image fades.
Parts includes the performance work Drama, in which professional actors produce tears in real time. The performance is situated among objects that are all actualizing or copying something, in an exhibition where things are often simultaneously representations and originals in their own right. Among this cycle of reproductions and the produced, a teardrop is an iconic, cinematic image of the emotional, while at the same time these are actual tears.
Kiasma is honoured to be bringing a new sculpture to its terrace in May. Nina Beier’s Women & Children (2022) takes the form of a group of found bronze nude figures. Streams of water pour out of the sculptures’ eyes; emotion is brought into the public sphere, and the water—materializing the gaze—reclaims the agency of figures who once symbolized the vulnerable. The work was produced for the High Line, New York, and has been acquired for the Finnish National Gallery’s collection with the generous support of the New Carlsberg Foundation.
The exhibition is curated by Piia Oksanen, Curator at Kiasma.
Nina Beier is opening two exhibitions concurrently, Auto at Capc musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux (France) and Parts at Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma. Although autonomous, they complement each other and together cover Beier’s twenty-year artistic career. The exhibition at Capc, curated by Sandra Patron and Cédric Fauq, centres around Beier’s interest in the contradictions of a globalized world, while the one at Kiasma, curated by Piia Oksanen, further unpacks these ingrained power structures, drawing attention to the way cultural codes define both animal and human bodies.
Beier’s work has been shown at major institutions, most recently: Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2024); Mudam, Luxembourg (2024); Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2023); the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California (2022); and Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin, Italy (2022). Her work has been featured in international exhibitions including: the Lyon Biennale, France (2022); the Busan Biennale, Korea (2022); the São Paulo Biennial, Brazil (2021-2022); Glasgow International, Scotland (2021); 20th Sydney Biennale, Australia (2016); 13th Biennale de Lyon, France (2015); and Performa, New York (2015).
At Kiasma, Drama will be performed every Friday and Saturday.
Women & Children opens to the public on Kiasma’s terrace on May 30.
