(Drawing: The Flanet wearing invisibility cloak)

In this moment of multiple crises around the world, it seems impossible to conceive of a future. How do we find the incentive to go on? How can we think differently about our future? Perhaps precedent lies with the precarious lives of artists who have come before; those who have continued in their work in spite of crisis and resistance. Artists who didn’t give up or drop out, but who passed through years of precarity and invisibility and who continued working somehow undeterred.

In 1952 – two years before she died – Astrid Noack went on a long, final journey to various places in Italy. There are three sketchbooks from this last journey, but there is only one surviving drawing where Noack leaves a trace of her own presence, sitting outside a café in Italy, drinking a cup of coffee and observing life around her. Characteristically, this drawing is almost discarded, torn from the sketchbook, a piece of the page is missing, and there’s an unreadable address written on the back of the remaining piece. In the front of the drawing, a single cup of coffee on an otherwise empty circular tabletop, contrasting a busy table in the background where five men are preoccupied with a game of dice. Noack observes the dynamic between the men meticulously — their body language reveals exactly who and what each of them is focused on. The group clearly have no idea that they are being observed; Astrid Noack is invisible to them. She takes advantage of her invisibility and shares her receptivity — along with her perspective with us: the circular table she rests her sketchbook on takes up half of the drawing. The thin lines that suggest the table have been altered twice, each time enlarging the table. She drew one version, erased it, drew a larger one, only to erase this one too. The final version of the table is now so large that it almost exceeds the borders of the page.

Some years ago, two characters appeared in my work: The Depressed Planet and The Flanet (the flat planet). They emerged as a way of dealing with a state of increasing exhaustion, a sense of an encroaching future without a future. Since then, they’ve made increasingly weary appearances in films, paintings, drawings, texts and sculptures. The materials I have chosen to render these husked figures with, tend to dissolve between an idea of their traditional use and their appearance. Sometimes the materials perform like an invisibility cloak as if The Depressed Planet and The Flanet were dressing up to disappear.

@h_heise

Opening Wednesday 17 August from 4pm-7pm

Open Saturdays 12pm-5pm or by appointment (e-mail: henrietteheise@gmail.com)

EVENT: Things Change Anyway

Saturday 3 September at 4pm, MC Coble and Louise Wolthers:

Things Change Anyway is an ongoing collaborative project by artist MC Coble and art historian Louise Wolthers. Consisting of photographs from the couple’s shared image archive, montage drawings by Coble and essays by Wolthers, it revolves around various kinds of metamorphosis in bodies, relationships, nature, and life – in all its non-binary impermanence and imperfection. Both the image flow and Coble’s drawings, a series of which will be on display at ANA at the event, convey a deliberately ‘messy’ complexity of ephemeral, bodily, and imaginary temporalities and experiences – of gender transition, ageing, and being put on hold by the system, of life after depression and ways of gaining agency. At ANA, readings from the essays include excerpts that connect themes such as photo history, abjection, trans* theory, the non-human, adoption, desire, friendship – as well as pictures never taken.

The event will be held in English.

CONVERSATION: Ambivalence 

Saturday 17 September at 4pm, conversation about ambivalence with visual artists Bertram von Undall and Henriette Heise. More infomation follows.

The event will be held in English.

The exhibition is supported by the Novo Nordisk Foundation and the Danish Arts Foundation. Thank you to til ANA, the Study Room at SMK and the Astrid Noack Study Collection at Holstebro Kunstmuseum.

BIO: Henriette Heise is a visual artist based in Copenhagen. Heise combines collaborative work with a more introverted studio-based practice. Heise graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in London and has since then co-founded and run several collaborative projects: The Info Centre in London, The Copenhagen Free University, the local TV-station tv-tv and most recently The Studio Whisperer’s Office. After ending 12 years of teaching at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2021, Heise is now working on a Novo Nordisk funded practice-based postdoc with the title: The Lunatic Future for the Depressed Planet and the Flanet: Learning from the late work of artists who figured out how on earth to keep going.

In their joint practice, Jan Danebod and Peter Olsen explore a number of mechanisms and processes in the public space with an in-depth interest in the city’s contemporary building culture, its biases and presence in a future that requires a radical change in our approach to the built environment; In climate and environmental issues in particular but also in the massive formative presence construction constitutes. For where and how is it possible in this all-encompassing urban space to carve a place out for oneself? They work sculpturally with materials found in these constructed environments and use the techniques of the construction industry in an attempt to mirror our surroundings and expose structures in order to draw attention to them.

To make this work accessible to the children and young people who move daily on and around the staffed playground in Bispeengen, they will take on the role of a kind of translators. They will move their studio to ANA’s mobile children’s studio for a period and through open artistic work processes try to equip the local children and young people with a sharpened view of their local environment.

With a hands on sculptural approach, the children will become acquainted with a number of materials such as cement, gravel, iron and brick, which form basic elements in the city’s many construction projects. They will come into contact with everything from redevelopment of green areas to the establishment of new construction. Urban planning that can generally seem elusive and out of reach. In Surrounded by Forest, Danebod and Olsen pull these issues down at a children’s level and make them available in new engaging and critically-creative formats.

The project is supported by The Danish Art Foundation’s Huskunstnerordningen

This discussion panel explores women artists working with sculpture. From its inception until today sculpting has been dominated by male artists, who have shaped the education and practice of sculptors through millennia. What does it mean to work as a woman in a field conventionally inscribed by masculinity? And what about the representation of women within sculpture? Women sculptors continue to be underrepresented in museum collections, exhibitions, and historical studies. Bringing together scholars and artists, this panel sheds light onto the overlooked sculpture queens of art history.

The event will be held in English from 14-15. Tickets are free and can be ordered on Billetto: https://billetto.dk/e/sculpture-queens-billetter-681200.

Participants bio:

Kerry Greaves is Assistant Professor of Art History at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on recovering overlooked aspects of Nordic art history, feminist theory and women artists. Her book, The Danish Avant-Garde and World War II: The Helhesten Collective was published by Routledge in 2019. In 2020, she edited the anthology Modern Women Artists in the Nordic Countries, 1900-1960 (Routledge).

Amalie Skovmøller is Assistant Professor of Art History at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. She has studied sculpture from Antiquity until today, centering on artists’ workshops and crafts communities. Her book Facing the Colours of Roman Portraiture (De Gruyter, 2021) explores representation in ancient, painted Roman marble portraiture, and her upcoming book Connected by Sculpture focusses on public monumental sculpture from workshop till display.

Jeannette Ehlers is a Danish-Trinidadian multi-media artist based in Copenhagen working in sculpture, film and performance. Her work addresses themes of memory, race and colonialism, such as her recent solo-exhibition at Charlottenborg Kunsthal, Archives in the Tongue: A Litany of Freedom (2022). She co-created the monumental public sculpture, I Am Queen Mary with La Vaugh Belle in Copenhagen in 2018, the first public statue in Denmark depicting a black woman. And in 2020 she received the Carl Nielsen and Anna Marie Carl Nielsen honorary reward.

Lea Guldditte-Hestelund is a Copenhagen-based artist who works sculpturally and performatively to examine how humans attach meaning to materials, especially in connection with the human view of the ideal body. She is a graduate of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (2015) and the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf (2013). Her recent solo exhibition at Politikens Forhal, Hissyfit (2022), narrates the mental and physical challenges related to motherhood through sculpture and installations targeting structural issues of modern health care systems and the history of misdiagnosis of women bodies.

Elisabeth Toubro is a Danish artist who has been a major contributor to the renewal of sculpture in Denmark. Born and raised in Nuuk, Toubro relocated to Copenhagen in 1977 where she attended the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She received the Eckersberg Medal in 1999 and the Thorvaldsen Medal in 2010, and in 2017, she made the Monument for Inge Lehmann at Vor Frue Plads, the first public depiction of a Danish, woman scholar. In September 2022, she will present an exhibition in collaboration with one of the most influential women sculptors of the late nineteenth century, Anne Marie Carl Nielsen, at Fuglsang Kunstmuseum.