Mathias Malling Mortensen: I Sing The Body Electric

With this exhibition, Mathias Malling Mortensen takes the next step in his artistic practice. His autumn exhibition at Esbjerg Kunstmuseum was rooted in paper and in his connection to his artist-grandfather, Richard Mortensen. Now, we are no longer confined to the two-dimensional surface of paper, nor bound by family heritage. Malling Mortensen embarks on a new chapter in his artistic narrative, inviting us on a journey across paper cutouts, paintings, and a sensory, vibrant space where fragments break free from their flat surface to take on form and come alive.

To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough

In the exhibition, five sculptures – creatures – crafted from paper, plaster, wax, and other materials hang. Forms from earlier works have been reassembled, stitched together, and reshaped into new bodies. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein lingers in these sculptures – just as Victor Frankenstein brings his creation to life through electricity, Malling Mortensen revives his lines and structures, allowing them to emerge in a new form.

The exhibition title, I Sing the Body Electric, nods both to Walt Whitman’s poetic celebration of the body and to the electricity that, in Shelley’s novel, brings the inanimate to life. The electric current becomes tangible in the soundscape composed by Simon Dokkedal. He has imbued each sculpture with its own tone, its own electronic circuit. Together, the sculptures form a choir that releases deep metallic tones and soft, rippling noise. The sounds weave in and out of one another, sometimes aligning in fleeting harmony before falling apart again – a dark, vibrating chorus of disjointed voices.

We are constantly shaping and reshaping our worlds, our bodies, our identities, our technologies. I Sing the Body Electric insists on eternal motion. Like Frankenstein’s creation, we exist in a state of constant transition – between the old and the new. The artist takes the next step in his practice; stepping out of one form and into another is always a risk – for the artist, for society, for the world. The outlines of what lies ahead are still unclear, with a transition already underway. Again and again, we sing ourselves and the world into being.

Examine these limbs, red, black, or white, they are cunning in tendon and nerve

Text by Majken Overgaard

Installation sound by Simon Dokkedal

Quotes by Walt Whitman: I Sing The Body Electric

Kilde:
Bricks Gallery