I Have Grown Taller from Standing with Trees - Claudia Comte at Copenhagen Contemporary

I have grown taller from standing with trees

Claudia Comte

Copenhagen Contemporary 8 February - 1 September 2019

 
 

This is a stunning exhibition in the main hall of Copenhagen Contemporary with the huge space filled with Spruce trunks that are six metres high but stripped of their bark and set on a carpet with a digitally-printed grid that becomes increasingly distorted as you move through the work.

The first rows of tree trunks are upright and set on the grid implying a carefully managed forest rather than natural woodland but the grid might also suggest the grid of roots through which, from recent research, trees are thought to communicate.

At the centre of the space is a large ceramic sculpture - the only dark form in the space - and beyond that the trunks are falling, either toppled by the ground appearing to collapse or with the apparent hollow created by the falling timber.

You are encouraged to climb on or over the trunks but watching people, it was clear that, as in a forest, the calm and the soft light means most slow down, talk quietly or sit and think - self absorbed. Light from windows and views out have been muted with white fabric that, as in a forest, undermines any sense of distance and direction.

The trees were around 100 years old when they were felled and the growth rings on the cut ends adds that dimension of time to the strong command of the corporeal space.

Claudia Comte at Copenhagen Contemporary

 

One Two Three Swing! by SUPERFLEX

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The first major installation for the opening show in the large main gallery space of Copenhagen Contemporary is by SUPERFLEX - the Copenhagen collective established in 1993 by Jakob Fenger, Bjørnstjerne Reuter Christiansen and Rasmus Nielsen.

This work was created in 2017 and was shown first in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London. The swings are each for three people and the metal tubular framework runs through the whole space at different angles and is even taken through to the outside to mark out and create spaces and routes through the hall. The repeated but separate movement of each swing is an expression of a common human experience from childhood but also shows the potential energy from the collective action of three people working together.

In the second hall the carpet there - reflected in a great silver pendulum - is woven with stripes in the colours of a Euro note.

at Copenhagen Contemporary, Refshalevej 173A until 30 December 2018

One Two Three Swing! /  SUPERFLEX at Tate Modern 

One Two Three Swing! / Copenhagen Contemporary

 
 

SONG 1 by Doug Aitken

A sound and video installation at Copenhagen Contemporary with six curved screens forming an almost enclosed circle so the 35 minute programme can be viewed from the inside or from the outside.

This uses the classic pop song "I only have eyes for you" interpreted by very different singers and musicians but what runs through the sequence is a persistent but very beautiful feeling of melancholy.

In some sections of the sequence, images are separate to each screen or in others they are repeated on alternate screens; some images are mirrored in pairs or they wash around the full circuit as a single scene like an amazing modern version of a fairground round-a-bout.

The original version of the song is a jazz standard from 1934 but listening to so many versions, recorded over so many decades, it seems truly timeless. Cultural references abound in the images and above all it seems to be a love song - not actually to a lover but to what is truly great about the United States and it's architecture and its graphics with universally recognised symbols from the 20th century about being American in modern America so there are scenes in diners and on free ways driving inter state or in all-night bus stations.

So this is not about the natural landscape of the States but about man-made settings - the built invironment imposed on the natural - generally larger but also smaller urban and anonymous man-made spaces. It's a view of metropolis that seems indescribably lonely and sad but here mesmerising and hauntingly beautiful.

at Copenhagen Contemporary, Refshalevej 173A through until 30 December 2018

Copenhagen Contemporary / Song 1