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Indepth Arts News:
"Thomas Bang: Tales of Frail Conditions"
2003-09-29 until 2003-10-18
Stalke Gallery
Copenhagen, ,
DK Denmark
It is with great pleasure that Stalke Gallery shows Thomas Bang’s first solo
gallery exhibition in seven years. The exhibition presents a group of six
new installation works along with a series of new drawings, which indicate
important aspects of Bang’s development during the last couple of years. In the group of works ”Tales of Frail Conditions” Bang is interested in the
object’s encounter with a world of turbulent change, a violent meeting that
in various ways has had an effect on the object and left it in a damaged
state.
In these works, meaning branches out into infinite layers of
complexity and paradox. An element that contributes to this network of
meaning is Bang’s strong narrative charging of the objects, partly through
the titles of the works, partly through the use of recurrent motifs and
themes in the group of works as a whole. The titles, like the objects, are
often enigmatic fabulations. They are formulated as abstract questions that
incite further reflection, and they generate a process of investigation
about the condition of the objects and the signifying elements present in
the works. In other words, it is not a case of well-rounded tales with an
Aristotelian beginning, middle and ending, but fragments that have to be
read against a narrative, causal logic.
The damaged objects in this group of works can be considered as a kind of
”apparatus of orientation”, some with well-known designations such as
scarecrows and traps, but all of them with an alien character. There is a
large degree of ambiguity surrounding their functionality, or rather
instrumentality, which cannot be understood through rationale, the faithful
companion of the instrument. What interests Bang in this
re-conceptualization of the instrument’s classic logic, is that it makes it
possible to see the instrument as more than a means to achieve a goal
defined by function, and thereby opens its functionality towards an
imaginary world that is in a permanent state of potential transformation.
IMAGE
Thomas Bang
Fælde, 2003
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