Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen

 

 

Jeppe Hein

Milieu Social

 

January 29th to March 20th 2010

 

It is a great pleasure for Galleri Nicolai Wallner to present Milieu Social a new installation by Danish artist Jeppe Hein.

Combining sculpture and installation with architecture and technology, Jeppe Hein sets up a dialogue between work, viewer and site. Like other of Hein's work the particular installation for Milieu Social involves the physical presence of the viewer set against a pattern of minimal forms.

 

Initially, visitors entering the gallery space will only face the gallery manager pedalling on an exercise bike in an otherwise empty room. The bike is connected with a steel construction and chain drive that leads through the wall to the room next door. Curious to figure out what the bike is driving on, people will find a mobile with four round and double-sided mirrors hanging from the ceiling of the second exhibition room. The distance between the mirrors allows visitors to move around and pass through them. The mobile turns around its own axis very slowly and subtly. Thus, the mirrors reflect the entire surrounding from various perspectives enabling the viewer to look at different parts of the space at the same time. Moreover, the double reflection created by overlapping mirror images at a certain position of all three mirrors, extend the space to infinity.

 

Milieu Social presents two rooms, one containing bicycle and the other a large mobile consisting of mirrored disks suspended from the ceiling. The two parts of the installation are connected by simple but ingenious machinery that allows the viewer to animate the mobile by moving the pedals of the bicycle.

Each of the mirrors in the mobile presents new views of the visitors caught in the middle of the seamless gallery space. Surrounded by mirrors, you become at once actor and audience, viewer and viewed, and your reflected image is simultaneously fractured and multiplied.

 

Ironically the person that is powering the work is at the same time excluded from seeing it. After taking seat in contraption it become obvious that a dividing wall obstructs the view of the mobile. Hein contests the accepted conventions of viewing and presents an energetic and playfully antagonistic relationship between art and audience. We are encouraged to participate in the creation of the artwork but are denied access to it. Hein likes to tease the viewer and carefully examines our individual and socially conditioned responses.

Importantly Hein's artistic production contains its fair share of humor. There is an absurd fascination of overtly complex machinery and innovation. Though not necessarily the full answer to the world's demand for clean energy, pedal power technology seems to have its own strange allure. It represents a certain causality that both puzzles and challenges the viewer.

With Milieu Social Hein seems to point to a new understanding of the exhibition space as a social environment. The exhibition deftly subverts preconceived notions making the viewer both instigator and object.

 

Jeppe Hein currently has a large solo exhibition at ARoS Kunstmuseum (Aarhus). He has previously had solo exhibitions at several other prestigious institutions including Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Tate Liverpool (Liverpool), Spregel Museum (Hannover), Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt), Frac Île-de-France (Paris), Sculpture Centre (New York), Musée d'Art contemporain de Nîmes (Nîmes), and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (New York).

 

Image:
Jeppe Hein
Mobile Mobile (2010)
Exercise bike, steel construction, chain drive, mirrors
Variable dimensions 
Unique

Photo credit: Anders Sune Berg

Courtesy:Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen, Denmark

 

Galleri Nicolai Wallner
Ny Carlsbergvej 68 OG
DK-1760 Copenhagen

Denmark
+45 32570970

 

Galleri Nicolai Wallner 

 

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