Kasper Akhøj
16 Jan - 19 Mar 2016
KASPER AKHØJ
Welcome (To The Teknival)
16 January – 19 March 2016
Ellen de Bruijne PROJECTS proudly presents Kasper Akhøj‘s second solo exhibition at the gallery. For this show Akhøj will present the concluded chapter of Welcome (To The Teknival), a work in progress since 2008.
Welcome (To The Teknival) consists of photographs taken by Akhøj during four visits made throughout the different stages of the restoration of E.1027, Maison en Bord de Mer. They are based on a series of photographs by Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici, first published in a special issue of the journal L’Architecture Vivante from 1929, the year their villa in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the Côte d’Azur first stood finished.
The classical approach to restoring a historical monument is to bring it back to its state when it first stood finished. In this case however, the early modernist villa also contains five of the nine murals that Gray’s friend and peer, Le Corbusier, painted there in the late 1930s without her permission. These much disputed murals play an important role as reference to the convoluted history of this site, and without their presence the house might not still exist.
The title of the work is a citation from another kind of graffiti from the 1990s, when squatters occupied the house, the wording of which mimics Grays own stenciled remarks originally set on the walls. As a first step in the restoration this graffiti was half erased by a layer of black paint. E.1027 was opened to the public in the summer of 2015.
Next to Welcome (To The Teknival) Ellen de Bruijne PROJECTS will present The Parrot’s Tail by Kasper Akhøj and Tamar Guimarães.
The Parrot’s Tail (2015) is a mixed media installation commissioned for the Belgian pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale. It is a fable in five parts, populated by fabulous creatures, allegorically treating the meeting between Western avant-gardes and non-Western cultures.
Kasper Akhøj (Copenhagen, 1976) lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark and Trancoso, Brazil. He studied at Städelschule (Frankfurt) and at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (Copenhagen). In 2009 he was a studio fellow at the Whitney Program and in 2010 he was artist in residence at the 29th São Paulo Biennial and Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center (Istanbul). In 2011 he was Artist in Residence at ISCP (New York). In 2015 Akhøj’s work was part of the exhibition at the Belgian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale.
Recently exhibitions include MAR – Museum of Art of Rio de Janeiro (2014), the 31st Sao Paulo Biennial (2014) and the 55th Venice Biennale (2013) – the last two in collaboration with Tamar Guimarães, and together they also exhibited at Jeu de Paume Satellite (Paris) in 2012. In 2010 Akhøj had solo shows at Wiels Center for Contemporary Art (Brussels), Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, and Overgaden Center for Contemporary Art (Copenhagen).
Welcome (To The Teknival)
16 January – 19 March 2016
Ellen de Bruijne PROJECTS proudly presents Kasper Akhøj‘s second solo exhibition at the gallery. For this show Akhøj will present the concluded chapter of Welcome (To The Teknival), a work in progress since 2008.
Welcome (To The Teknival) consists of photographs taken by Akhøj during four visits made throughout the different stages of the restoration of E.1027, Maison en Bord de Mer. They are based on a series of photographs by Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici, first published in a special issue of the journal L’Architecture Vivante from 1929, the year their villa in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the Côte d’Azur first stood finished.
The classical approach to restoring a historical monument is to bring it back to its state when it first stood finished. In this case however, the early modernist villa also contains five of the nine murals that Gray’s friend and peer, Le Corbusier, painted there in the late 1930s without her permission. These much disputed murals play an important role as reference to the convoluted history of this site, and without their presence the house might not still exist.
The title of the work is a citation from another kind of graffiti from the 1990s, when squatters occupied the house, the wording of which mimics Grays own stenciled remarks originally set on the walls. As a first step in the restoration this graffiti was half erased by a layer of black paint. E.1027 was opened to the public in the summer of 2015.
Next to Welcome (To The Teknival) Ellen de Bruijne PROJECTS will present The Parrot’s Tail by Kasper Akhøj and Tamar Guimarães.
The Parrot’s Tail (2015) is a mixed media installation commissioned for the Belgian pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale. It is a fable in five parts, populated by fabulous creatures, allegorically treating the meeting between Western avant-gardes and non-Western cultures.
Kasper Akhøj (Copenhagen, 1976) lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark and Trancoso, Brazil. He studied at Städelschule (Frankfurt) and at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (Copenhagen). In 2009 he was a studio fellow at the Whitney Program and in 2010 he was artist in residence at the 29th São Paulo Biennial and Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center (Istanbul). In 2011 he was Artist in Residence at ISCP (New York). In 2015 Akhøj’s work was part of the exhibition at the Belgian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale.
Recently exhibitions include MAR – Museum of Art of Rio de Janeiro (2014), the 31st Sao Paulo Biennial (2014) and the 55th Venice Biennale (2013) – the last two in collaboration with Tamar Guimarães, and together they also exhibited at Jeu de Paume Satellite (Paris) in 2012. In 2010 Akhøj had solo shows at Wiels Center for Contemporary Art (Brussels), Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, and Overgaden Center for Contemporary Art (Copenhagen).