Overgaden

Uncovering absurdities of human technologies and their following truisms, Madeleine Andersson’s visual signature is sped-up, research-led storytelling in entrancing moving images. For O—Overgaden, Andersson has created a major new video installation centering on how electricity has been used as a metaphor and means to objectify and optimize, control and not least classify the human brain as dumb, intelligent, or dead. A focal point in Andersson’s new anti-establishment query is the Harvard Medical School committee on brain death, whose 1968 report, which defined irreversible coma through the detection of electric impulses, officially moved the formal diagnosis of death from the heart to the brain, thus setting off a new cultural paradigm. From early 18th-century electrical experiments, Victorian electromedicine, and 20th-century electroshock therapy, through to today’s AI brain, Andersson paves an unorthodox route into a shocking understanding of how electricity has been a hit-or-miss tool in manipulating our understanding of the human mind.

Madeleine Andersson (b. 1993, SE) is a graduate of the Royal Danish Art Academy (2022) and lives and works in Copenhagen. Andersson has previously exhibited at venues including Färgfabriken, Stockholm (2023): Bærum Kunsthal (2022); Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2022); Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen (2019, 2020); Accelerator, Stockholm (2019); and S.M.A.K, Ghent (2019). The exhibition Degenerative Knowledge Production marks the culmination of Andersson’s participation in O—Overgaden’s one-year postgraduate program, INTRO, supported generously by the Louis-Hansen Foundation.