An Age Of Our Own Making
May 13–August 15, 2016
City of Holbæk
DK-4300 Holbæk
Denmark
Open all hours
June 25–July 3, 2016
The Museum of Contemporary Art
Stændertorvet 3D
DK-4000 Roskilde
Denmark
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday noon–4pm
Roskilde Festival
Festivalpladsen Darupvej
19 DK-4000 Roskilde
Denmark
Open all hours
September 15–November 20, 2016
Kunsthal Charlottenborg
Kongens Nytorv 1
DK-1050 Copenhagen K
Denmark
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 11am–5pm,
Wednesday 11am–8pm
“‘All right then,’ said the savage defiantly, ‘I’m claiming the right to be unhappy. Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.’ There was a long silence. ‘I claim them all,’ said the savage at last.”
– Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1931)
The observation that the world is staggering through dire straits in our current age is hardly a hyperbole. Having maneuvered it(self) into stormy waters, the thinking body of today must pause to reflect on its position in the world and deliberate unanthropocentrically on its relation to other beings and things.
It is from this angle that the research and exhibition project An Age of Our Own Making, happening in Denmark 2016 as part of the Images Biennial, takes its cue.
Together with 30 artists, critics and people from all walks of life, An Age of Our Own Making ruminates on our actions and their repercussions, and how these have crafted our age for better or for worse. The advent of modernity in the 16th century still reverberates to this day; of all its known glories including enlightenment, the quest for individual freedom and equality, advancements in science and technology, the modernist project also brought with it coloniality. “The darker side of modernism,” as Walter Mignolo describes it, generated and cultivated structures of economic, political, racial and ecological power gradients that reign until today. It is to this regard that ideas of decoloniality—which identify in the capitalist and neo-liberal economy and politics, and their critical aftermaths a continuation of that darker side of modernity—are enacted.
An Age of Our Own Making unfolds in three separate exhibition parts, Reflections I-III, opening one after the other in three different Danish cities. The first reflection, The Life of Materials. On Another Nature and Ecology, interrogates the western notion of ecology, as well as the capitalocene and its logic of circulating goods globally. Through public sculptures and installations in the city of Holbæk, this exhibition reflects on the effects of consumer actions as well as the life of materials which exist beyond our perception. The second reflection, The Route that Tempts the Traveler to Test Gravity—Notes on the Paradigm of Immunization, relates to current political issues such as free movement versus isolation and over-protection and also ideas of physical freedom, and how these issues leave imprints on man, physically and mentally. This reflection is a performance programme that will take place at both the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde and the Roskilde Festival portraying the body as a site of politics. Finally, the third reflection, An Age of Our Own Making—On Agency and Enacting Citizenship, an exhibition at Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, will look at possibilities of creating, claiming or using space as forms of enacting citizenship. Be it real or virtual, the manifestations that make space political or give a lost, deserved or forgotten meaning back to a specific space will play a central role.
The project invites everyone to reflect on how we want to co-exist, along with the non-human, in this world—beyond current tendencies of overprotection and unsustainable privileges.
Curators:
Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Solvej Helweg Ovesen.
Images is a biennial for contemporary art from Africa, Asia and the Middle East taking place all over Denmark. In 2016, Images will concentrate on visual arts, on the artist, and on the society artists live in and comment on in their work. Images is supported by the Danish Centre for Culture & Development—CKU—a self-governing institution under the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
