WASTELAND
Wasteland is an analogue photography exhibition that explores the borderland between our urban and rural realms – and nature’s revenge. We asked 5 photographers to capture the useless, wasted and divinely forsaken.
Wasteland is part of the Golden Days Festival – Golden Days på Landet @golden.days
Opening days: 2-11 September 2023 from 12:00-16:00
Vernisage: 2 September at 12:00 noon
Contributing photographers:
Kristina Aurora Simonsen
@kristina.aurora.photography
Maria Heines
Carl Magnus Lindström
@carlmagnuslinstrom
Jón Bjarni Hjartarson
@jon_bjarni
Kim Wyon
@dark_gallery_cph
The exhibition also includes Dias film projections in the gallery Dark Spaces by @andreas_olesen
Previous exhibitions:
SKIN
Intimacy in an age of alienation
The SKIN exhibition at Dark Gallery CPH combines analogue print photography and slide projections contributed by two artists and one activist artist collective. Each contributor has explored the concept of intimacy against the backlight of our times of alienation.
Erika Matsunami
Berlin-based Japanese visual artist Erika Matsunami (photography, video, installation and performance) invites us into a world of close-up photography where the body is remapped and reshaped by the ontological preconceptions and expectations of the viewer. Inspired by post-war phenomenology, her alienated motifs depict undisclosed skin and body parts that beckon our sensual and emotional interpretation. Erika Matsunami’s micro-lens inspired exploration of human skin is conveyed as slide projections into the gallery’s Dark Space 1, which is a fully functional bathroom. The front gallery exhibits 3 B&W silver gelatine prints and 4 coloured C-prints by the artist – images that are part of her investigative project B.O.D.Y. the second skin. The context of her photography and artistic oeuvre is communicated via a poem that is also available in braille, 4 dialogue postcards, and a QR code to her website. The imagery by Erika Matsunami will be on display at Dark Gallery CPH until September 2023.
Read more about Erika Matsunami here.
Andreas Olesen
Danish-American artist photographer Andreas Olesen has created a mechanical projection installation with a complex motion drive for a diapositive film loop. Designed using 3D printed spools, a modified vintage slide projector and ball bearings from skateboards, his prototype projection installation invites visitors to explore several generations worth of images, all compiled in random order. The images are both personal and anonymous, vernacular and specific, historical and contemporary, and are picked from the archives of three generations of two lines of his family as well as his own collection of found images. Among them, images of his gun-slinging (Danish) grandmother and his dope-smoking teenage years alongside colonialist images from Greenland. The projection installation materialises the social media exposure of the digital age to create a kind of “mechanical Instagram.” Qualified by a true-to-life sense of immediacy and intimacy, the projection installation and its unfiltered imagery offers both conceptual and emotional respite from our alienated world of online pretence. Much to the artist’s surprise, the film loop is flipped mirror-opposite with each rotation. A mathematical formula for this inversion is yet to be explored. Technical production by Sean Mitchel and Luke Boshoff. Andreas Olesen’s projection prototype will be on display in Dark Space 2 at Dark Gallery CPH until October 2023.
Read more about Andreas Olesen here.
The Missing Alliance
A pop-up exhibition by the activist feminist group the Missing Alliance offers a sneak-peek of their joint exhibition to be featured at Dark Gallery CPH in October 2023. The Missing Alliance explores how the female body remains estranged from the public space, which in a roundabout way renders unwarranted intimacy to what rightfully should be a normalised sphere of commonality. The activists pose incisive questions, such as why women do not have the same freedom as men to walk bare-chested in public, why they are expected to shave their body hair and wear makeup, and why women’s menstrual fluid is considered an embarrassment. Seeking to explore the female body liberated from the sexualised male gaze, the activists engage in street happenings and feminist activism in the public space, which is documented in the pop-up exhibition in the form of 4 kaleidoscopic B&W photo collages.
“Because A Mother Never Stops Bleeding”
Dark Gallery CPH is excited to invite to the opening of photographer Carolina Echeverri’s art show and publication release, entitled:
The show centers around Echeverri’s delicate yet radical publication, which explores the biological and psychological changes brought about by motherhood. The diary-turned-activism piece aims to shed light on the lack of research and awareness around the invisible cost of motherhood. It is a collection of personal reflections, intimate photography, mother’s testimonies, women’s brains, and neuroscience woven together to give greater meaning to the maternal struggle.
Through the publication and art show, Carolina seeks to confront the lack of understanding and awareness around the mental changes brought about by motherhood. The show features a collection of images that blend maternal life with the beauty of biology. The luscious brain landscapes serve as a background to her maternal candid yet anxious view, and are based on scientific brain images created from MRI projections, brain slices, and histology imagery from different human, mostly female, subjects.
According to Carolina, this project was born out of a personal realisation of the biological and psychological changes brought about by motherhood. In the absence of sufficient research and education, she turned to personal research to understand these changes better, which led to the creation of this publication.
“This is not a science book or exhibition,” Carolina emphasizes, “it’s a personal diary which mutated into printed activism through research and passion.” The publication is a manifestation of her heart-breaking rebellion against ongoing structural systems that fail families with their most basic humanity all around the globe.
Exhibition period: 6-27 May 2023
Opening: 4 May from 15:00-17:00
Opening days:
Tuesdays and Wednesday 14:00-17:00
Thursdays and Fridays 14:00-18:00 (except 18-19 May)
Saturdays 11:00-15:00 (except 20 May)
The gallery is also open by appointment.
Read more about photographer Carolina Echeverri here: www.carolinaecheverri.com
For further information please contact:
Press: Viktoria Skovhus – T: +4540768492 – vskovhus@gmail.com
2 September 2022 – 1 May 2023
I have a crown, I am a queen
What makes you an everyday queen? We posted an open call on social media looking for co-interpreting female models. Six women approached the gallery to share their life, dreams and ideas with us. Exploring the uncharted borderland between social-media selfie and photographer-guided portraiture, we created individual kaleidoscopic storyboards that reflected on the co-creative process and dialogue.
The exhibition was featured in the gallery dark space in the red glow of darkroom safety lighting. Visitors could experience how the artificial light in the adjacent rooms naturally changed colour after the visit to the dark space – because their eyes had gotten used to the red background light of the dark space. Some suddenly saw the light as green, others yellow or beige – even though the light sources had not changed.
The exhibition was developed in partnership between photographer and artist Kim Wyon from Dark Gallery CPH and artist Mahmoud Alibadi.
The exhibition at DARK GALLERY CPH was part of the Golden Days Festival 2022 and remained open from 2 September until 28 October 2022.
11 March – 20 May 2022
MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE – Travel into dreams
Travel into dreams – in the gallery darkroom. War nightmares, romantic fantasies, otherworldly escapes?
Recently graduated as a photographer from Universitè Paris 8, Vincennes Saint-Denis, in Paris, Cléa Castel invites visitors to explore nightly dreams in the gallery dark space. Bring your friends, lie down on the soft matrasses and cushions, close your eyes, listen to stories of dreams – and share your own. Or visit alone and whisper your nightly dreams to complete strangers.
You can book a private dream-sharing session on Tuesdays 15:00-16:00 for you and your friends – or join a group of strangers.
On Monday 14 March, you can join evening dream-sharing from 19:00-21:00.
Cléa Castel’s dream photography series will also be featured on the walls of the dark spaces in DARK GALLERY CPH. Get accustomed to the red safetylight of the darkroom and pick them out.
4 September 2021 – 1 February 2022
NARCISSUS – og de syge myter / MYTHS BY MATCH LIGHT
Analogue photography by match light. The exhibition took a
dark look at the ancie
Analogue photography by match light. The exhibition took a dark look at the ancient Greek myths that have given rise to modern-day psychiatric diagnosis. Visitors were handed a box of matches at the entrance with which to explore the analogue kaleidoscopic collages that were featured in the gallery dark space.
Visitors would explore the multi-layered collages by flickering match light, an experience enhanced by the slight wind current of a small fan in the gallery space. During opening days with many visitors, the sulphuric odour of the many match strikes would create an atmosphere reminiscent of the grottos of the Oracle of Delphi.
The classic Greek myths of Antiquity are the founding narratives of modern-day psychiatric diagnosis. They are tales of phobia, traumas and madness. In the Greek myths, these states of mind were often seen to be induced by the gods. The exhibition sought to mirror these ancient tales of madness in our panicked age of pandemic and power-grabbing narcissism.
During the pandemic lockdown, the exhibition was open by appointment to closed groups, including school classes.
The exhibition was concepted and created by photographer and artist Kim Wyon. The exhibition at DARK GALLERY CPH was part of the Golden Days Festival, ANTIKKEN.
MAU MAU – the exhibition has been prolonged until 1 January 2023
MAU MAU is a documentary photo exhibition based on a never-before published war diary and photo album of a British soldier serving in colonial Kenya in 1955.
For decades, coffee-growing European settlers, including Danish storyteller Karen Blixen, had colonised the ancestral lands of the Kikuyu tribespeople in the Kenyan highlands. When MAU MAU insurgents rebelled against the colonists in the 1950s, the Kikuyu suffered the worst British war crime against civilians since the RAF bombing of Dresden in World War II.
More than 1.5 million Kikuyu were deported by the colonists to a system of concentration camps where they suffered starvation, torture, rape, summary execution, forced labour, and rampant epidemics.
The MAU MAU exhibition is a personal journey of discovery by a son of the British soldier – in search of answers to questions never asked.