Copenhagen Brands
featuring the artist groups AVPD, rasmus knud, and Luxus
Plan
of the exhibition space
Press photos
February 17. - March 10. 2001
Curated by Solvej Ovesen and
Henrikke Nielsen
Branding, advertising, marketing,
presentation, service, slogan, logo design, corporate identity
these are words and concepts associated with the world of commercial
business. They apply also to the artworks by three Copenhagen
artist-collaborations, AVPD, Luxus, and rasmus knud, presented
in the exhibition Copenhagen Brands at Sparwasser HQ.
In Copenhagen Brands, the project is the product, the
aesthetic object; the exhibition objects and the individual artists
are subsumed, operating under the labels of their respective
artist-groups. Ultimately, it is the action and the performance,
not the product that are crucial to the concept of Copenhagen
Brands.
AVPD employs marketing and
economic strategies in the staging of events. The Stockholm
Project, for example, consisted of a helicopter flight over
Stockholm at Artgenda 1998. In addition to the works exhibited
in the project space at Sparwasser HQ, during the first three
days of the exhibition, Rainonoff,
an artificial rain shower in Bergstrasse, will be turned on at
4 pm and off at 5 pm. In line with former projects, AVPD draws
on common myths and symbols, e.g. rain, that are exploited often,
as strong metaphor and fascinating phenomena, in popular culture
and film. By exposing its technical source, AVPD reveals the
rain as a product of film equipment, deflating its otherwise
poetic implications.
Luxus operates within the social
and service industries. At Luxus' website, www.luxusevents.net,
subscribers to Home Hospitality Project can enter
their addresses into a database, becoming members of a global
network that provides other members with overnight travel accommodations.
The project Opgang, meaning staircase, was a fictional
staircase in Copenhagen, where people could design and build
their own living spaces. Luxus constructs, although not always
physically, a framework within which meetings and actions defined
by the participants can take place. For example, the floor in
one of the Sparwasser HQ's rooms is covered with fresh grass,
an invitation to play croquet: luxury and leisure in the exhibition
space.
The formation of The Soccergette
Firm, the fan club of the fictitious female football team
Seven Sisters, is the framework within which rasmus knud
explores themes of individual and collective identity. The football
world is imitated in their work through representations of pennants,
slogans, and a CD with marching songs, presented in context with
a history of the turn-of-the-century feminists, the suffragettes.
In order to describe the different human relations that make
up a community, rasmus knud take as their point of departure
popular football culture and its marginalized fraction of female
football players. Since 1992, rasmus knud, a loosely structured
and partly fictional group of artists, has dealt with similar
topics of identity and community; they took part in Manifesta
2000, Ljublana and Monumentum 2000, Nordic Festival of Art, Moss,
Norway.
AVPD, Luxus, and rasmus knud
unveil preexisting, but partly hidden, social and mental structures
in contemporary society. Thus, they cause us to reflect on manners
and customs, and to recognize a range of possibilities in relation
to other people and situations. Rather than being passive voyeurs
or artists performing in the (hermetically sealed off) ivory
tower of the art scene, AVPD, Luxus, and rasmus knud intervene
directly in the social structure, under the premises laid out
by that reality. The goal is not to protest against a hegemonic
order, but rather to establish spaces of potential action.
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