Michala Paludan og Rasmus Røhling: Raw, individual values

Connecting the village of Damme, on the island of Møn, with the town of Vordingborg, the municipal seat of the eponymous commune in which they’re both located, is the route 664 Movia bus. A second point of connection is that they are home, respectively, to the artist couples Michala Paludan and Rasmus Røhling, and Maiken Bent and Torben Ribe. But with the former duo having never previously exhibited together, a scenario that fully contrasted with that of the latter, who themselves have a long history of joint exhibitions, an invitation to do a two-person show at ORTHUNGA was issued forth from the historic town hall, Kornerup’s Rådhus.

This proposal almost took the form of a dare, a challenge that was obviously accepted. But in agreeing to share the gallery’s exhibitions spaces, rather what we find is more like two shows in one, with the vertical and horizontal planes dialectically divided up and designated for exclusive use, one per artist. Where one hangs their work on the walls, moving across these flat areas from left to right, sequentially, one after another; the other employs the volume between the ceiling and the floor, building the works up, like palimpsests, with so many sedimentary layers.

A Petit Écolier milk chocolate cookie relief, and a Durer-esque engraving, among other objects. (This set of eclectic “images” are presented lying down, in scorsio, on one-meter-tall rods raising them up from the floor. Puffed up and glossy, each appears as if a “sticker” filter had been applied to it; when, in fact, exploration/ ultrasound gel drips on their faces from dispensers that are periodically squeezed by upper arm blood pressure cuffs suspended from the ceiling.)

With the script established, and the roles of the two artists cast, those of the space’s directors fixed, all that was needed was a writer. Which is where I come in: If one could assert that these two artist couples are a pair of twin planets orbiting within the same solar system, one could perhaps then say that I am a comet that visits the former nearly every year, and the latter roughly every five, having first met them all in 2011 while co-organizing an exhibition with Howie Chen at IMO, Maiken and Torben’s former space (with a group of fellow artists and directors Toke Lykkeberg and Julia Rodrigues) in Carlsberg, Copenhagen. While taking on the character of the 664 bus would be redundant, what I could inhabit instead was a version of Brooks Walker's fifth wheel from the 1930s, installed at the back of an automobile at 90° to the other four so as to better facilitate parallel parking by moving the vehicle sideways.

In fact, in coming to think of this quartet of artists as a kind of rhyming couplet, the first draft of this text was a 400-word, five stanza poem, an inadvertently composed festsang. Talk about moving sideways. In its place—and borrowing from Google’s AI overview of the exhibition’s title, which it defines as the “original, unprocessed data points collected directly from a source for each individual observation or subject, without any aggregation, cleaning, or transformation”—I present a list of selected objects that, as of the date of writing, may or may not be in the exhibition. I’ll have to wait until closer to the exhibition's closing in October to confirm in person; when this current roughly five-year cycle ends, and our orbits once again align.

Three blue rectangular prisms of varying heights (Each one wrapped in resistance bands, these three square columns or pedestal-like forms—one unadorned, one with the white Smurfs hat, one dressed like the Na’vi from the Avatar movies—form the kind of bar chart used to visualize data, while taking on the physical and nonsensical “mannerisms” of the animated characters that they evoke.)

-Tim Saltarelli.

Rasmus Røhling (f.1982) bor og arbejder på Møn og i København. Røhling arbejder hovedsageligt med video og skulptur. Hans seneste værker beskæftiger sig med forskellige aspekter af repræsentation inden for sundhedssektoren og hvordan denne ikonificering relaterer sig til så vel kunsthistoriske, som politiske spørgsmål.
I Røhlings praksis handler arbejdet med repræsentation lige så meget om at tilbageholde og omkode ”billeder” som det handler om at skabe nye. I sine værker kaprer Røhling ofte eksisterende billeder, genstande eller fænomener for at indoktrinere – eller gen-associere – dem med nye betydninger.
Tidligere udstillinger omfatter bl.a. Simian (DK), Soldes(US), Den Frie Udstillingsbygning (DK), Sismografo (PT), Human Resources (US), Artist Space (US), Art Hub Copenhagen (DK), Museum Fur Gegenwartskunst Basel (CH) og Primer (DK).

Michala Paludan (f. 1983) bor og arbejder på Møn og i København. I løbet af det seneste årti har Paludan undersøgt og udfoldet, hvordan magt produceres og forhandles på tværs af netværk og bevægelser gennem medier som video, fotografi og installation. Paludan har udstillet bredt i Skandinavien og i udlandet. De seneste udstillinger omfatter: h/ånd på Fotografisk Center, I Am Your Body: Automation på Kunsthal Aarhus og Strange Attraction på Malva, Finland. Paludan er udstillingsaktuel i gruppeudstillingen Frøsamlerne på SMK Thy. Det omfattende fotoprojekt The Unposed (EoAT) blev i 2024  udgivet som bog på forlaget Disko Bay Books.

Kilde:
ORTHUNGA