Kaspar Bonnén, THE PAST WILL NEVER LEAVE YOU
25 May - 01 Sep 2013
Kaspar Bonnén
THE PAST WILL NEVER LEAVE YOU
25 May – 1 SEPTEMBER 2013
As the exhibition title implies, we live with our memories of our upbringing and many people even try to reconstruct the secure conditions of childhood. But what memories are created by a home where Mother was schizophrenic? And how have the various spatialities of childhood affected the memory of one’s upbringing? These questions are raised in this ambitious exhibition by the visual artist Kaspar Bonnén. Through a staging of his childhood home built up of open constructions and sensory materials Bonnén grapples with this complex entity, memory, and offers new spatial experiences.
The installation can be called a memory theatre andconsists of a series of rooms in the GL STRAND exhibition space on the 3rd floor, based on the ground plan of the apartment where he lived as a child with his sister and a mentally ill mother. Bonnén has reinterpreted some of the rooms in order to explore a variety of spatialities – mental, emotional and actual spaces. Through displacements in the architectural structures, the incorporation of personal objects from his mother’s home and text-based works, the staging expresses various moods and emotions that Bonnén associates with his upbringing and childhood home. Experiences that he has written about earlier in the book Skabelser (Creations) from 2010, which forms the background for the exhibition,
Kaspar Bonnén (b. 1968) graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 1999. He works across media such as text, performance, sculpture, painting, photography and video art. Since the start Bonnén has been interested in space as a locus of experience or a metaphor for emotions. Kaspar Bonnén is represented in major collections including the Danish National Gallery, and some of his public decorations can be seen at the Opera on Holmen and the Crown Prince’s mansion at Amalienborg Palace.
THE PAST WILL NEVER LEAVE YOU
25 May – 1 SEPTEMBER 2013
As the exhibition title implies, we live with our memories of our upbringing and many people even try to reconstruct the secure conditions of childhood. But what memories are created by a home where Mother was schizophrenic? And how have the various spatialities of childhood affected the memory of one’s upbringing? These questions are raised in this ambitious exhibition by the visual artist Kaspar Bonnén. Through a staging of his childhood home built up of open constructions and sensory materials Bonnén grapples with this complex entity, memory, and offers new spatial experiences.
The installation can be called a memory theatre andconsists of a series of rooms in the GL STRAND exhibition space on the 3rd floor, based on the ground plan of the apartment where he lived as a child with his sister and a mentally ill mother. Bonnén has reinterpreted some of the rooms in order to explore a variety of spatialities – mental, emotional and actual spaces. Through displacements in the architectural structures, the incorporation of personal objects from his mother’s home and text-based works, the staging expresses various moods and emotions that Bonnén associates with his upbringing and childhood home. Experiences that he has written about earlier in the book Skabelser (Creations) from 2010, which forms the background for the exhibition,
Kaspar Bonnén (b. 1968) graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 1999. He works across media such as text, performance, sculpture, painting, photography and video art. Since the start Bonnén has been interested in space as a locus of experience or a metaphor for emotions. Kaspar Bonnén is represented in major collections including the Danish National Gallery, and some of his public decorations can be seen at the Opera on Holmen and the Crown Prince’s mansion at Amalienborg Palace.