Introduction for Archive for "From the 2001 Venice Biennial"

For the exhibition "From the 2001 Venice Biennial" at Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Fos and I were invited to create an archive, design the catalogue and exhibition poster. The idea with the show was to invite six artists and give them each a solo show together. The artists were Henning Christiansen, Ursula Reuter Christiansen, Liza May Post, Sergei Shutov, Olga Chernysheva, Eliezer Sonnenschein and Minnette Vári.

We decided to work with the taxonomy of artist archive and invited the six artists of the show to, themselves, decide how the wanted to be represented. It could either be something about them, e.g. catalogues, or something that in some way had inspired or influenced them. The outcome was very different among the artists, and very interesting. The archive offered a new explicit insight into their works as well as an implicit because of the way the chose to represent themselves.

As an example Minnette Vári spend 2 days writing down names of people that had influenced her. It became a list with 2.400 names, more than 70 A4 pages. Henning Christiansen chose to show old LP's with his sound pieces, Ursula Reuter Christiansen a jewellery catalogue for which she modeled and Lisa May Post catalogues and exhibition flyers.

The archive itself was a platform inserted into the existing architecture on top of the staircase leading to the galleries. As an "insertion" it itself served as a new layer and exploration of the exhibition space as well as the archive did.

The exhibition ran from 21 June to 18 August 2002 and was curated by Charlotte Brandt.

Fos/Kenneth A. Balfelt