søndag, marts 04, 2007

NEW EXHIBITION. Ann Lislegaard: Crystal World


x-rummet at Statens Museum for Kunst 24 February - 5 August 2007

Mutating architectural structures, crystallised landscapes and an almost hyper-real light. The Norwegian-born artist Ann Lislegaard's animation piece Crystal World (after J.G. Ballard) draws the spectator into a science fiction universe in x-rummet at Statens Museum for Kunst.

In her photographs, videos, 3D animation pieces, and sound/light works Ann Lislegaard explores the structures through which reality is constructed - how we relate to the spaces we move through, and how applied social notions define our consciousness, gender, and self image.

Crystal World (after J.G. Ballard)
Crystal World (after J.G. Ballard) is an evocative and silent 3-D animation. A journey to an abandoned hotel situated in a slowly crystallising dense wilderness. There are traces of a catastrophe. Water is forcing its way through the architecture. Chairs, beds and cupboards are displaced, drifting through the rooms. The crystalline world that emerges is one of infinite reflections. It is sci-fi scenario of change and destabilisation.

In Crystal World (after J. G. Ballard) Lislegaard investigates the possibility of creating an alternative reality. A new structure that challenges our usual preconceptions of time and place. Lislegaard uses the crystal as a metaphor to describe how the experience of the present and the physical surroundings are filtered through previous accumulation and breakdown of memories and experiences. A mental state in decay and change at one and the same time - a super-crystalline structure.

Crystal World (after J.G. Ballard) invokes an entropic future that is both a physical state and a state of mind. The artist's poetic, yet disturbing work slowly transforms the xrummet into a universe where spectators glide into a timeless stasis of a parallel world.

The installation takes its cue from the British science fiction writer J.G. Ballard's conceptual novel The Crystal World from 1966. The installation is the second part of the artist's trilogy of works with science fiction as their overall theme. The first, Bellona (after Samuel R. Delany), was presented at the 51st Venice Biennial in 2005.

As well as references to J.G. Ballard's science fiction scenarios, Lislegaard alludes to icons of modernism like Oscar Niemeyers's Pavillion in São Paulo, Lina Bo Bardi's glass house Casa de Vidro, Eva Hesse's immaterial sculpture and Robert Smithson's Dead Tree from 1969.

About the artist
Ann Lislegaard (b. 1962) is a professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. Her works have been exhibited at prominent venues in Denmark and internationally; the MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the MOMA Museum of Modern Art Oxford, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and at Louisiana Museum for Moderne Kunst in Denmark. Lislegaard recently contributed to the São Paulo Biennial in 2006, where the work Crystal World (after J.G. Ballard) was presented for the first time. Lislegaard lives and works in Copenhagen and New York.

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