Hunters and Gatherers

Based on the experience of the total solar eclipse in 2017 and 2024, the artist duo Considered to be Allies have created a new video work and invited five other artists to join them in a dialogue about humanity's relationship to each other and to the world around us.

Humans as herd animals are central to the exhibition, which invites collective reflection through performances, workshops and the experience of the exhibition's individual works.

At the main entrance to the station, you are paralysed like a deer in the light of two blinding headlights in Nicky Ulrich-Sparre's painting. Ulrich-Sparre uses light and darkness to create narratives that sit between the illusion of the painting and the viewer's own frame of reference. For the exhibition, he has drawn on his past as a graffiti painter who hunts, collects and is hunted in the dark.

The station's poster frieze features digital collages by American artist Coley Mixan. Here, the aesthetics of fast food advertising are distorted into psychedelic tableaux that manage to both appreciate and criticise the consumer-oriented material reality we have created around us. Ida Schrader's sculpture Deadlock is on display in the exhibition space: electromagnetic pendulums that look like a mechanical cornfield. The exhibition also features Schrader's three beeswax reliefs; round faces that with their yellow colour evoke the sun and moon, but who is the sun and who is the moon?

In the days of hunter-gatherers, eclipses were seen as a bad omen, something that fell outside the normal rhythm of nature. Today, it's an epic event, a pop culture spectacle with accompanying merchandise and memorabilia. Considered to be Allies video installation in the centre of the room documents the circumstances surrounding two total solar eclipses in the US and shows us the enduring unifying force of nature.

Nickie Sigurdsson is interested in how ritualistic-centred structures can help counteract the effects of late capitalism and how these tools can guide us in being collective. In her work Night Sweeper, found and manipulated objects are combined with plants from Sydhavnstippen. The sculpture will later be activated in a workshop taking place at Sydhavnstippen on 16 May. Maria Lepistö works with animal communication and in addition to a sound installation based on her many years of research into the communication between wolves, she will also invite you to a ‘Howling Workshop’ at the opening on 26 April.

Participating artists
Coley Mixan (US), Nicky Ulrich-Sparre (DK), Ida Schrader (DK), Maria Lepistö (SE), Nickie Sigurdsson (DK) and the artist duo Considered to be Allies consisting of Mie Frederikke Fischer (DK) and Margaux Parillaud (FR).

Source:
Sydhavn Station