Fragrant Phantoms

Kristoffersen and Plum’s work activates transforming entries, gloomy qualities and personal virtues through sculptural constellations and video installations. The artists each touch upon different depictions of subjectivity, drawing it in different directions, crossing the usual limitations of internalization and externalization of experience and draw our attention towards a destabilized state in between. We pass from lush colours and pearl patina into deep and dark sounds of witchcraft and morphing fantastical creatures. The pieces installed play out as almost theatrical characters, performing bizarre and irregular couplings with each other and across the room.

Kristoffersen’s pieces open up a poetic universe of instabilities, metamorphoses and ancient mysticism through different sculptural manifestations. A crafted and cast sphinx trembles inconsistently and never settles as a stable form. The installed pieces blur the boundaries of comfortable registers and intensely unstable experiences. Beasts, bastards and beauties blend with pleasant colours and soft textural materials to form shared expressions. Subjectivity is never a stable condition, but wanders, reshaped and opposed to the notions of set identifications. As if reading becomes an act of experimentation in open zones between female, animal and mystical formation. Kristoffersen flirts with darker sources of power and dangerous female forces to push straight representation and unity out of singularity and into new configurations that take us into the wonders of the unknown.

Plum’s sculptural works function as prop-like formations, - as delicate and personal attributes characterize the objects status. Materials such as artificial hair hang from niches in the ceiling and build up memories shaped through braided and knotted bindings. Geometrical trophies or perfume-like bottles shine with mother of pearl as perfected and straight forms over the room. Plums draws through her piece our attention to a marginal state between our own natural and given properties and the artificial additions we can add on in order to stage, hide and perfect the overall appearance. The hair connotes layers of lived experience that grow with time, and although we know its quality is fostered synthetically, it triggers a sort of personified or living depiction. The materials register respective vulnerabilities and explore the relationship between private abject experience and public manifestation and presentation. Plum’s works examine how the connotation of beauty and identity can play out as kinds of social orderings in the universe of perfection and ideal appearance.

Curated by Iben Bach Elmstrøm.

The exhibition is kindly supported by Balderdash and Pernod Ricard.