Bubbles - an art route through the city
Inspired by the idea of the bubble as a temporarily delimited world where the usual social norms dissolve and are redefined, the Museum of Contemporary Art has filled the city with bubbles of art. From a rotating hedge by the harbour to the North to gravel sculptures at Musicon to the South, fourteen artists from the studio collective 51Cth in Trekroner have created all-new artworks for the city. Each work is a bubble in itself, an artistic practice you can immerse yourself in – as long as it lasts.
Pop!
As part of Bubbles, the Museum of Contemporary Art invites you to BUBBLES LIVE during the weekend of 3–4 July 2021, featuring talks, performances, music and workshops at Musicon.
Also, look out for the ACTIVIST CHOIR, who will visit the city on 18 June. They will pass through the city in a singing procession, starting at the Amphitheatre in Folkeparken at 15.00
JoHNA HANSEN: Push a Bush
Materials: Yew, grass, soil, gravel, non-woven fabric, plywood, metal sheets, metal pipes, wheels, ball bearing, ground screw, acrylic plaster, styrofoam, pigment
Location: The lawn in front of the Viking Ship Museum, close to the playground Søstjernen
‘I thought it would be great fun to discover the many different ways in which the city’s architecture, people and nature work together – or don’t work together. There is a continuous push-and-pull movement, an oscillation between control and savagery. For example, in the lawn in front of the Viking Ship Museum, a shortcut has been formed diagonally across the lawn – an unauthorised path that has arisen as a direct consequence of human resistance to their own landscape design. By acting as a revolving door on this “spontaneous” path, Push a Bush is a form of nudging, controlling social design created around an uncontrolled situation.
My interest in the bush as an object and material arose on a trip through Roskilde where I became aware of the many shrubs, bushes and hedges that inhabit the city. Just for fun, I began to divide them into categories: functional hedges, decorative hedges, filling-in hedges, wild hedges, fence hedges, and so on, and then I started thinking about whether it would be possible to assign an entirely new trait to a shrub. Push a Bush is a kind of conceptual hedge. It is a hedge that blends in, camouflaging itself in the landscape, but at the same time it is completely different from other hedges because it can spin around – it is a kind of super-hedge. I see the work as an invitation to consider the ways in which the area is laid out and designed – and to reflect on how shrubs and hedges affect the way we navigate the city’.
Johna Hansen works with site-specific installation art, sculpture and performance art. Her practice focuses on concepts such as functionality, form, materiality and interactivity. Hansen holds an MA in architecture from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts’ School of Architecture.
Materials: Synthesised sound, speaker, bronze, concrete, print, electronics, cables
Location: Church of Saint James (Skt. Ib)
‘My practice is set in the field where sculpture and sound intersect. Carrier consists of a sculptural sound work and a print created for – and with – the desolate church of Saint James (St. Ib) and Sankt Ibs Kilde (Saint James’s Well). In 1816, the church’s bell tower was demolished, meaning that the church has had no bell for more than two centuries. You might say that with this work of art, the church gets its bell back – albeit in a digitally generated and disembodied version based on an analysed audio recording of the nearby holy well. Using a special technique, I take this recording – a captured record of the wellspring at a specific point in time – and use it to create a new and highly different version of the tonal information. Through a loudspeaker, a bell sound is played at varying intervals, resonating in harmony with the church space. In this way, the sound is translated from wellspring, to bell, to church space, while the tonal content remains the same. The sound work is accompanied by a print; a kind of technical drawing that includes the tonal characteristics of the digital bell and a formal starting point for a physical bell based on the digital sound.
The history of bells as symbol, a means of communication and an object surrounded by superstition is directly relevant to the holy well as well as to the redundant church and their changing fortunes. Over time, both have functioned as part of an essential network and been attributed radically different and changing meanings and value. After serving as a place of worship, the redundant church has been used for a wide variety of purposes, including as a field hospital and warehouse, while the well, whose waters were believed to have healing properties, ran dry for many years because of water bores constructed elsewhere. In this sense, Carrier is anchored in history, working actively with shifts and displacement of time, symbols and layers of meaning’.
Hans F. Beck graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2019. Taking a research-based approach to his art, Beck’s practice is founded on an interest in time, memory and materiality, and in how we generate, construct and pass on knowledge.
Ida Retz Wessberg: Water Sculpture for Saint John’s Well
Materials: Jesmonite, PU foam, plastic, metal, isomalt, bubble wrap, plastic hoses, water pump and water from Saint John’s Well
Location: Byparken, by Saint John’s Well (Sankt Hans Kilde)
idaretz.com
Instagram: @idaretz
‘I am interested in circuits and ventilation systems, and in how I as a sculptor can give form to air. My works often take their starting point in a material or object that contains encapsulated air, and Water Sculpture for Saint John’s Well is one example - here, I have among others casted bubble wrap. I see these aspects as deliberate restraints I impose on myself, forcing myself to explore how I can make a sculpture out of an invisible material while at the same calling attention to a material that is not only a major supporting factor in the classic sculptural process – for example in the hardening of plaster or the firing of a kiln – but a vital necessity for all living species. For me, air and ventilation are symbols of our mutual interdependence and of the social and biological circuits of which we are all part.
Reflecting this, my work is a sculptural circuit that has attached itself to another circuit – the fabled St. John’s Well, which has its wellspring near the Cathedral and runs down through the city park, and which waters reportedly have healing powers. The work consists of three vessels cast out of jesmonite, a Pellegrino water bottle, and hoses directing the water up from the well, through the sculpture and down back into the spring again. Furthermore, the vessels feature castings of painkillers such as Codeine, Bonyl and Paracetemol. I see them as ornaments that enter into a conversation with the history of the place as a holy well and source of healing. I have also cast a sphere out of coloured isomalt. Isomalt is a type of sugar, meaning that the sphere will slowly dissolve in the waters. It adds an element of transience to the work, emphasising the relationship between the visible and the invisible. In my works, I combine classic sculptural materials such as bronze and plaster with various everyday materials and non-art materials. By combining and juxtaposing these different categories of materials, I want to challenge the boundaries between the traditional, exalted materials used throughout art history and everyday consumer goods’.
With a nod to fellow women artists from art history, Ida Retz Wessberg’s sculptural practice takes its point of departure in the relationship between air and substance, between the fleetingly immaterial and the solidly material. Retz Wessberg graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2018.
Thank you: Hans von Hirsch, Christian Vind og Maja Li Härdelin
Morten Plesner: Knotweed structure No. 3
Materials: 500 kg clay, concrete, foundations
Location: Byparken (near Pipers Hus)
mortenplesner.dk
Instagram: @mortenplesner
‘Knotweed structure No.3 is a site-specific fired sculpture – a vast work made of clay that is modelled and fired on site. This involves a long process where I first stack up a fire-proof base and then build the sculpture on top of it, leaving openings for the firing. The work is constructed entirely from clay tubes, their cross section inspired by the stems of plants such as Japanese knotweed. Creating a capillary effect, the structure will channel the heat from the fire up through the clay. Once the clay is dry, I wrap the entire sculpture in ceramic felt and slowly fire the wood inside. It takes a day of firing for the clay to reach a sufficiently high temperature for me to lift the felt away – and finally reveal the sculpture, which will glow red-hot in the twilight.
Fire and firing are aspects that are often included in my works, acting as untamed resources or functions that transform the sculptures or add a particular aesthetic quality to them. A central trait of my practice is a deliberate loss of control where nature’s own processes and the magic of chance become partners in the creation of new works. You could say that I set out the terms, launch a process, and let nature complete the work. I seek to inscribe my works in a form of primitive, primordial culture where the inherent properties of the material govern the aesthetic. To me, there is excitement to be found in having the natural and the manufactured, the past and the present mix in ways that can make the viewer doubt what they see: are we looking at man-made artefacts or nature’s own random creations?’
With the encounter between nature and the man-made as a focal point, Morten Plesner’s practice is poised between craft and concept, between tradition and experiment. Plesner is a trained scenic painter from the Royal Danish Theatre.
Jacob Alrø: Labyrinth
Materials: Steel, aluminium and jesmonite
Location: In Folkeparken, near Lovisekilden
‘The sculpture Labyrinth consists of an upright figure attached to two chairs. The figure is based on a drawing made by the travelling artist F. W. Sieber in 1817, recording the Gortyna caves in Mount Ida in southern Crete. Also known as the Gortyna maze, the cave is considered by some to be the original Minotaur labyrinth. To my mind, Sieber’s choice to depict the origin of a myth as a motive is an excellent example of the changing times in which it was created. It captures the reshuffle of the hierarchies of knowledge seen during the Enlightenment, where mythical and fantastical narratives had to give way to a scientific worldview. In this sense, the sculpture speaks of how our approach to the world is ever-changing.
The organisation, or rather reorganisation, of information through language and issues of space and scale are recurring themes in my practice. Using a wide range of techniques, I create works that cut across different statements. I weave together signs, art historical references and formal modes of expression in new constellations, thereby pointing out how we produce meaning and perceive the world around us. It is my hope that Labyrinth can prompt curiosity about the narratives that underpin our approach to and understanding of the world – and perhaps even remind us that we have a say in which we reject and which we imbue with value and take on board’.
Jacob Alrø is a graduate of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. In his recent work, Alrø focuses on how our understanding of the world depends on the narratives we create about it.
Peter Jensen: Inf īnītus
Materials: Plaster, steel, balloon
Location: The corner between Dronning Margrethes Vej and Louises Vej, at the ‘entrance’ to Folkeparken
‘Working professionally with bronze casting, I usually only make art on behalf of others, but this time, I took on the role of creative artist myself, and the process proved incredibly liberating and rewarding. I have worked with a completely new, open-ended set of terms and conditions, and so my work is essentially based on concepts such as boundlessness and ambiguity. All of the elements used to build up the work have several different meanings or functions. For example, the basic element of the sculpture, the largest of the three “legs”, is based on a classic L-shape familiar from agriculture, where it is used for storing crops etc. However, the same shape is also used to build boundary walls, for example in Israel. The figure in the middle of the sculpture is another example – it is based on a shadow of a human body I saw at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in Japan. When the atomic bomb hit, the outline of a human being burned itself onto a rock; a translation from 3D to 2D, which I then returned to a 3D shape using traditional sculpting methods. And finally, there’s a balloon on top – a symbol just as ambiguous as all the others. Balloons suggest a party of some kind, adding another layer of paradox – it’s all fun and games when you’re on the right side of the border’.
Peter Jensen owns and operates Broncestøberiet (the Bronze Foundry) at Industrivej in Roskilde. He took over the foundry after his father, and has since expanded it to become Scandinavia’s largest. In 2008, Jensen received the Thorvald Bindesbøll Medal for his contribution to Danish culture.
Frederik E.: L.P (Landscape Paintings)
Materials: Concrete, glue, print toner, steel
Location: Sortebrødre Parkeringshus, lower floor
‘My project L.P (Landscape Paintings) consists of a series of wall-hung concrete elements with photographic print transfers. The project is based on a selection of visual statements that have been illegally drawn, written or painted onto buildings and public places in various cities in Europe. I have collected and documented these statements over time: some are conspicuous, others easy to overlook; some are offensive, others startling. This project highlights a small selection of their graphic and geographical variation: from drawings done in boathouses in the harbour of Palermo to inscriptions in caves under Maastricht, slogans from the façades of Athens and drawings allegedly made by local teenagers in Sortebrødre Parkeringshus in Roskilde. The statements all share a common intention to make a public display – they are traces of actions that exist independently of the sender, becoming a kind of social diary and visual history of our common environment.
The title of the work does not refer to an artist’s personal perception of a particular landscape, but instead points to those countercultures, those marginalised and minority groups who have over time used the urban landscape as channels of communication. Here, the lower floor of the car park facility forms a new framework for reading and decoding – a kind of depository that reflects the statements and presence of various anonymous citizens across time and place’.
Frederik E. is a graduate of the Kungliga Konsthögskolan in Stockholm and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. E. is interested in how societal ideas, expressions and conflicts are reflected in urban spaces and architectural statements. Fascinated by the ways in which we attach meaning to our history through built cultural heritage, he often focuses on architecture and its connection with public spaces.
Adam Fenton: Byggematerialer (Building Materials)
Materials: Spray-painted plaster, plastic, found objects
Location: Duetorvet
adamfenton.co.uk
Instagram:@ultimateaestheticdancefloor
‘At first glance, you see five euro pallets of building materials wrapped in plastic, but closer inspection reveals that these are not ordinary building materials, but spray-painted plaster casts of Greek columns, plinths and busts. You could say that I work with a kind of reverse archaeology, leaving it up to the viewer to imagine what the objects are for. Standing there in front of the bank, wrapped in plastic, they appear to be on hold, awaiting further developments. Their function and narrative are still up for negotiation – leaving the viewer free to fill in the gaps themselves. I am excited by the prospect of creating entire worlds, immersive environments, where typical aesthetic and cultural notions are challenged, dissolved and redefined. I am not very interested in creating new things, preferring instead to reconstruct, reorganise and mix objects and visual modes of expression, thereby creating opportunities for new meanings to emerge. Changing the context makes it clear which values and symbols we assign to objects. For example, the aesthetics of antiquity, with which I often work, is dense with symbolism and links to history, to power, to exalted nobility and substance – but what happens when we separate the aesthetics from its context? When hierarchies between materials and form dissolve, and plastics, euro pallets, glitter and ionic columns form part of the same universe? Is this classical or kitsch?’
Occupying a field where sculpture, installation and performance art intersect, Adam Fenton works with alternative and hyper-aesthetic universes where everything is pure façade and nothing has historical, symbolic or cultural significance. Fenton graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2019.
Regitze Engelsborg Karlsen: Fra et støvfyldt bryst (From a chest filled with dust)
Materials: Gravel, stone, sound
Location: Roskilde Library (inside, by the newspaper area) and Musicon (on the corner between Lydmuren and Rabalderstrædet, next to Aaben Dans)
regitzeengelsborgkarlsen.dk
Instagram: @regitze_engelsborg_karlsen
‘Fra et støvfyldt bryst (From a chest filled with dust) comprises three parts: sculptures, gravel and sound. It was created especially for Roskilde and the Bubbles exhibition. With the work, I hope to call attention to the relationship between man and geology and the various organic processes and energy fields that exist in everyday materials. I want to attribute new value to the gravel pit in Roskilde by giving it a visible presence in the city. My sculptures mingle with the locals visiting the library and Musicon, and you can listen to the sound work, which consists of processed recordings from a local gravel pit, while you’re going about your errands. In this way, I hope that my work can add a newfound awareness of and care for our gravel and the ways in which we extract and exploit the earth’s materials.
I am convinced that we urgently need to reset our partnership with the landscape and its materials, and I hope that new narratives can help us realise the responsibility we have towards our surroundings. I think we get something absolutely indispensable out of the physical encounters with sculptures, materials and each other. I hope that Fra et støvfyldt bryst (From a chest filled with dust) can act as such an encounter – an aesthetic encounter where human and geological time merge’.
Regitze Engelsborg Karlsen graduated from the Jutland Art Academy in 2018. Based on research, Engelsborg Karlsen’s practice focuses on issues concerning the body, politics, ecology, feminism and materiality.
Silas Inoue: re:prʘductiʘn
Materials: Neon, wood, mushrooms, sugar, isomalt, plastic, concrete, water
Location: Cooling tower behind the old slaughterhouse on Køgevej 5. Walk along Jernbanegade, behind Stationscentret (next to Føtex)
‘In re:prʘductiʘn I examine natural processes such as sex, reproduction and symbiosis from a human and non-human perspective.
On the roof of an old cooling tower, I have erected a neon sign, its bright colours signifying that the building has been given new life. Inspired by various species of lichen (a composite organism made up of fungi that live in a symbiotic relationship with algae), the sign constitutes my attempt to give these peculiar organisms the attention they deserve. While algae draw energy from sunlight (photosynthesis), mushroom feeds on other organisms (living or dead), and is taxonomically more comparable to animals than plants. With lichen covering 7-8 % of the planet’s surface, it is a most common and evident example of symbiosis between species of radical different natures.
I have worked with references to voyeurism, sex shops and the advertisements found in major cities - this is expressed by the neon sign and by the fact that you can only view the installation inside the tower through peepholes in the wall.
Inside the building are wooden sculptures depicting overgrown reptiles and amphibians. Like the building itself, the sculptures are being eaten by organisms that transform dead material into new growth. Different species of fungi grow out of the sculptures. The fungi are kept damp by steam billowing from a plateau in the middle of the room. On top of the plateau lies a flower made of sugar and isomalt. Like the stamens of real flowers, the sculpture attracts various insects, but in contrast to the pollination that typically takes place between flowers and bees, the sculpture makes no contribution to reproduction. On the contrary, it acts as a kind of false nectar that robs nature’s real flowers of the possibility of being pollinated because the insects are more strongly attracted to the sugar. In the end, We are all drawn to something, and I hope that re:prʘductiʘn will be a breeding ground for non-human life forms and human fantasies alike’.
Silas Inoue graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts’ School of Design in 2010. Engaging in a constant interaction between the spontaneous and the controlled, Inoue examines the relationship between growth and decay, nature and technology, the material and the spiritual. He describes his visual style as quasi-Asian, reflecting his half-Eastern, half-Western origins.
Christine Overvad Hansen: Tweaked encounters
Materials: Glazed refractory concrete, stainless steel, POM wheels
Location: Path along Ringparken, close to the Roskilde courthouse
christineovervad.dk
Instagram: @christine_overvad
‘Tweaked encounters consists of three carriage-like sculptures placed by a path near Ringparken. Each of the three sculptures have their own unique function and form, engaging users of the path in different ways.
One carriage offers its potential driver a shielding and reflective refuge from the outside world and passers-by, letting its driver look out through two peepholes placed at eye level. Another carriage gently carries a round vessel whose contents appear to have evaporated or crystallised over time. The third and last carriage appears partly as a drum-like instrument and partly as a needlessly complicated means of transport for a cylindrical figure. Despite their seemingly functional appearance, all three carriages appear to have been left behind, their original destination or purpose abandoned.
With Tweaked encounters, I want to create a sculptural narrative that is played out in the encounter between the viewer and the performative qualities of the sculptures. By inviting the users of the path to explore the potential functions and purposes of these sculptures, the work strives not only to form the basis for a discussion of the relationship between body and tool – but also of the more or less conscious adjustments to which we subject ourselves and others as we step in and out of social relationships’.
Interested in the performative qualities and potentials of materials, Christine Overvaden Hansen works in an expanded sculptural field that bridges the gap between fiction and direct experience. Overvad Hansen graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2016.
Viktor-Emil Dupont Billund: Ui
Materials: Mixed media
Location: The lawn behind the City Hall, along Musiconstien
viktorbillund.com
Instagram: @viktoremildupontbillund
‘My work is a kind of physical, sculptural adaptation of a Ui (User interface). Acting as a membrane between the human and the digital realm, a Ui is a threshold between two worlds where information, commands and questions can be exchanged. Our exchanges with the digital realm have never been more numerous or more important than today, with my own artistic work also growing increasingly dependent on a translation between my physical reality and my digital tools. This has changed my view of my physical workshop and the importance of working with my own hands. My hand-held tools have gone from being real-life, concrete objects with specific functions and patterns of usage to become mysterious, almost occult remedies, their appearance describing entirely different and deeper aspects of the hand’s work as culture and as ritual. Ui consists of perforated steel boards, which I have put together to form small spaces. I envision these boards as the most direct means of translation between a Ui and the familiar workshop or studio set-up. On these boards, you get a clear overview of which tools are available and how they are categorised – just like on your PC screen. On these boards, I have mounted several smaller works associated with sculptural work – including a range of recycled seven-inch nails, a three-legged toad, 3D scans and a group of slugs cast in cement, beeswax and insulin. All are more or less abstract objects where systems, meaning and orientation merge and diverge’.
Viktor-Emil Dupont Billund is a graduate of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. In his practice, Dupont Billund is interested in examining the relationships between the physical and digital space.
Kirke Hundevad Meng: A Voyage Subjected to Joy
The work is active every day between 21.30 and 03.00
Materials: Laser projection of drawing and digital collage
Location: On the wall of the City Hall (the old building)
‘As a visual artist, it is interesting to work with the meaning of images and how they change over time as society develops. Images are thoughts, feelings and actions – and they simultaneously point away from and towards itself. You could say that through my works I try to create a world that strives to equalise linguistic and visual systems. A Voyage Subjected to Joy is a fiction telling the story of a dystopian future, communicating ominous graphs about climate change, rising temperatures and water levels by means of colourful laser animations. I am inspired by artist Marcel Broodthaers’s film and book A Voyage on the North Sea from 1973 and by a lecture by theorist Rosalind Krauss on the same work. Based on the notion that everything in the future is experienced aesthetically and that all messages and images can be capitalised, I have worked with the idea that everything is form and nothing is content. Here, a dangerous and uncertain journey into the future is conveyed through the format of cheerful advertising and entertainment. From the new building of the Roskilde City Hall, the work is projected onto the façade of the older building, its repetitive concrete elements forming a grid-like canvas that as the sun disappears gradually becomes a black surface. The work reflects the frustration that governs our time. My scenes of amateur paintings and photos of sailing ships are there to assist the viewer's own narrative – or fiction. The animated fish skeletons, DNA-like strings and bathymetric maps (charting sea depths) play with the optimistic belief that humans can innovate their way out of crises’.
Kirke Hundevad Meng works with images, language, signs, emotions, politics and culture as mutually interdependent entities. Hundevad Meng graduated from the Kungliga Kunsthögskolan in Stockholm in 2015.
Lydia Hauge Sølvberg: Untitled
Materials: Concrete, pigment
Location: On a path in Folkeparken, parallel to Klostervang
‘My process often begins with an idea of some specific imagery, formal approach, or narrative. I work with sculpture and images, especially reliefs executed in different materials. The relief interests me because the flat format allows me to work with form and pictorial illusion alike.
For this exhibition, I have cast tiles out of coloured concrete and placed them on the ground. One depicts leaves on a tree, somewhat stylised and abstract, as if the subject is in motion. The second represents two arms reaching down into water, forming circles of small waves. I have placed them in an open, but dark, place in an otherwise lush park, where the treetops soar high above’.
Lydia Hauge Sølvberg graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2017. Hauge Sølvberg works with encounters between drawing and sculpture and between inner states and outer forms.
THE ACTIVIST CHOIR IN ROSKILDE
18th juni 2021, 15.00
The Activist Choir’s city walk is a mobile-interactive performance where audiences can become participants through community singing, movement, dialogue etc. We will move through the city of Roskilde from Folkeparken to Stændertorvet, bringing along a wagon that serves as stage, music score and sculptural symbol. We mainly work with new material that allows EVERYONE to participate, regardless of singing ability, language, age, etc. The material comprises various protest songs, exercises in nurturing and care, incantations, activist dances, voice training and more, and these elements are also presented in a regularly updated physical songbook. The procession will consist of a succession of chapters, each connected to a specific geographical location.
AKTIVISTKORET has made a karaoke version so you can join from home
