Our House is Red-Hot
Hanne Nielsen & Birgit Johnsen

May 24th – June 22nd

Charlotte Fogh Gallery is delighted to present the exhibition Our House is Red-Hot – a solo exhibition by Hanne Nielsen and Birgit Johnsen. The exhibition consists of the video installation, Particles, and a series of sculptural moving objects, Turning Tubes and Fortune Tellers.

 

In the video installation, Particles, Hanne Nielsen and Birgit perform as a kind of female clones of the past plague doctor and a futuristically dressed scientist. Together, they wander through Tarkovsky-inspired scenes – an overgrown fun park, overgrown ruins, a rocky landscape and burning fields – equipped with drones, tools and measuring equipment. Drones flying in jerky movements act as the performers’ extended arm and provide vertical perspective, to be able to travel through time and space.

Interspersed with archival media footage, the installation presents a number of different ‘reflection rooms’, where clips of historical events are interwoven with personal and mythical interpretations through a crystal ball. While particles in the form of dirt, fog or smoke can refer to climate change, pollution, war or a lack of transparency, particles in the sense of eolian dust are also the prerequisite for existence.

 

The exhibition Our House is Red-Hot takes us on a global journey in a world full of particles with the desire to partly see through obfuscations and extract information about the world’s conditions as they are now, but also an attempt to look into the future. The future is up in the air.

 

Hanne Nielsen and Birgit Johnsen’s way of working conceptually is characteristic with a strong focus on the global, political reality and awareness that media images and the video medium in general are a decisive force in our society. They depict the world we live in with visual poetry, with humor and with a persistent commitment to feminist political issues.

 

Hanne Nielsen (b. 1959) and Birgit Johnsen (b. 1958) are internationally recognized and their investigative and experimental approach to video has given them pioneer status on the Danish art scene. They are the recipients of numerous awards, most recently the Ny Carlsberg Foundation’s artist award, the Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen award and the prestigious Eckersberg medal. In 2021, they received the lifetime grant from the Statens Kunstfond.

Nielsen and Johnsen have collaborated since 1993 and have exhibited widely in Denmark and abroad, their works include represented at Aros and SMK – the national gallery of Denmark

 

 

For further information, pictures etc. please contact Charlotte Fogh Gallery