ROLL YOUR EYES
Billie Maya Johansen, Kitsum Cheng og Yuki Kishino.
4. oktober – 27. oktober 2019
Roll your eyes er en installation som består af individuelle værker skabt af Billie Maya Johansen, Kitsum Cheng og Yuki Kishino. Øjenrulning indebærer normalt en passiv aggressiv refleks. På udstillingen har kunstnerne valgt at vende om på ideen, lade den være en legende instruktion og stimulere fantasifulde svar. De reagerer på elementer fra verden omkring dem og med deres arbejde foreslår de positiv handling.
Billie Maya Johansen, Kitsum Cheng og Yuki Kishino mødte hinanden i deres studietid på Städelschule i Frankfurt og viser nu deres værker sammen på udstillingen Roll your eyes i Odense.
Billie Maya Johansen er en dansk kunstner, der arbejder i forskellige medier. Hendes arbejde undersøger subjektets påvirkning i vores hypermedierede samtid. Hun har udviklet videre på hendes igangværende værk Fatigue, som her er en interaktiv væg installation bestående af en række rundskårne serigrafiske tryk opsat på plastik hyldesvirper.
http://billiemaya.com
Billie Maya Johansen – “Fatigue“, 2019
Kitsum Cheng er en canadisk kunstner. Hendes værker er undersøgelser af produktion og cirkulation af materielle og immaterielle genstande. Kitsum viser en tredimensional kunstbog som arbejder med taktile overflader, og som tilbyder en anderledes læseoplevelse.
http://kitsumcheng.com
Kitsum Cheng – ”Class of Oohlala, Fans of Fancy Things”, 2019.
Yuki Kishino er en japansk kunstner, der hovedsagligt arbejder med tidsbaserede medier. Hans værker er observationer af den psykologiske udvikling og forskydninger i psykologiske tilstande. Yuki viser værket ‘Music for Flowers’, som er sammensat af lokale blomster, sodavandsflasker og et lydværk.
Yuki Kishino “Music for flowers” 2019 (Lydværk).
Be a passive spectator
A short text about the illusion of independent thoughts and the works of Billie Maya Johansen, Kitsum Cheng and Yuki Kishino.
By Theis Vallø Madsen
Being a modern human being is about being in control. We want to control our lives, our minds, our surroundings including nature for good and (mostly) worse. People who are not in control of their lives and minds can be diagnosed as schizophrenic or mental retarded. Yet, there are philosophers arguing that our thoughts are not our own. Philosopher Alan Jacob has argued that thoughts are products of other thoughts thought by other people via conversation, texts, things etcetera. In The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone, cognitive scientists Sloman and Fernbach describe the mind as a beehive where intelligence resides not in individual brains but in the collective mind. We store knowledge in our heads, but also in our bodies, in the environment, and especially in other people. Our thoughts come from the outside rather than the inside, you can say, and we are much less in control of our opinions or ideas than we would like to believe.
Looking at art is usually considered to be a one-way experience. A subject will approach an artwork and look at it, and the subject will figuratively speaking try to “penetrate” the surface of the artwork in order to understand it. Here, subjects must approach an artwork, see it, analyze it, in order to understand it. However, if we accept the idea that our thoughts are produced by a collective, artworks become the active part and the onlooker becomes the passive part. Here, artworks approach the subjects, not the other way around, and it is artworks and their surroundings that produce our thoughts at that specific time. The direction of the gaze is flipped so that the onlooker becomes the one being looked at, heard, or approached somehow.
The eerie sense of artworks looking back at its audience has been exploited throughout the history of art. Since the antiquity artists have painted eyes on sculptures and flat surfaces in order to create a certain presence, liveliness and sense of immediacy upon entering the room of the artwork. The concept of the collective mind is also liberating because it allows us to understand artworks as much more than passive objects with predetermined meanings. The idea of active artworks thinking for us means that we are far from being in control. We are not self-contained, self-minded subjects with the world in front of us but rather physically, mentally and intellectually enmeshed in the world.
In Billie Maya Johansen, Kitsum Cheng and Yuki Kishino’s exhibition at M100 in Odense, the audience must ignore their need to understand the artworks as objects with hidden, predetermined meanings. These artworks invite you to simply be present. Eyes are jumping out, sound and floral scent are coming in, and different kinds of surfaces in books are reaching out. These things are not only objects of study but also works of art that trigger new thoughts leading to other thoughts leading to other thoughts – in you or in others.
Yuki Kishino, Billie Maya Johansen og Kitsum Cheng – Fernisering.
Besøg af billedkunsthold fra Odense Katedralskole.