Liesel Burisch: Bring Time / Monia Sander Haj-Mohamed: Heavy Body, Heavenly Body

O—Overgaden Institute for Contemporary Art announces its two summer exhibitions running through August 7, 2022.

Liesel Burisch: Bring Time
Presented as large-scale video installations and attuned to the sound of a rhythmic techno beat, Liesel Burisch’s first institutional solo exhibition, Bring Time, investigates the perishability of the afterparty and its potential for celebrating fragile and temporary spaces, as well as the relationships and conversations that flourish in these moments.

Riffing on the politics of queer nightlife, the central video piece Never Stop—shot in and around O—Overgaden, as well as at bars, clubs and private homes—alternates various party-related scenes that compile themselves in a cyclical form. Here we meet a group of performers who reveal to us moments from the intimate slowness of party preparations, the freedom and collectivity of dancing, and the deep conversations of the afterparty. Their movements and fragmented conversations blend with a hypnotic deep bass electronic score that fills the exhibition space built of scaffolding—a temporary construction, just like the pre- and afterparty.

What’s left when the party ends? The transitions between night and everyday life create space for the release of deeper emotional connections and expanded notions of care. This is also addressed in Burisch’s zines that are displayed as a large poster wall in the exhibition, based on scientific writing, manifestos, and personal experiences. In them Burisch explores how transitory spaces surrounding the party itself hold the possibility for us to meet in free expression released from prejudices, expectations, and obligations.

Liesel Burisch’s (b. 1987, Denmark) work often emerges from collective experiences, conversations, and intimate collaborations that create seductive and hypnotic spaces for dialogue. Burisch is a graduate from Städelschule (Frankfurt), Universität der Künste (Berlin), and California Institute of the Arts (Los Angeles). They live and work in Copenhagen and Berlin.

Monia Sander Haj-Mohamed: Heavy Body, Heavenly Body
What is the range of the performative space when reality and fiction intertwine? This question is central to artist and writer Monia Sander Haj-Mohamed, who includes text, drawing, sculpture, sound, performance and staging in her first institutional solo exhibition Heavy Body, Heavenly Body, which unfolds as a meditative tour de force exploring the artist’s personal practice.

Gazing at the 25 abstract line drawings presented in the exhibition, one is sucked into an intimate interior. The neat maze motif of the drawings takes shape from an intuitive, focused channelling of energy. For up to 16 hours at a time, Haj-Mohamed lets a pen stroke move across a piece of paper until it eventually meets itself again, creating a complete enclosed form. Made over a period in which grief, transformation, and trauma healing have weighed heavily in the artist’s life, the drawings act as witnesses of inner journeys through life.

The drawings are accompanied by the audience-generated performance work Nothing That Goes Through Me Belongs to Me (2022), which evolves from weekly joint script readings of Haj-Mohamed’s new untitled manuscript, which visitors are invited to join. In non-choreographed meetings, participants are asked to bring themselves into play through their interpretation of the work, negotiating their common ground as they move along. All readings are recorded and accumulated in a procedural sound work that continues to add layers throughout the exhibition period.

Monia Sander Haj-Mohamed (b. 1988, Denmark/Tunisia) works interdisciplinarily with references to the theater to explore the span of performative space, where reality and fiction intermingle. Haj-Mohamed graduated in 2022 from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts with the performance work Break and has, as a writer, published the two books Dominique and The Alexander Trilogy.

O—Overgaden is one of the leading non-profit contemporary art institutions in Denmark with an irreverent program of emerging local and international voices, displaying around eight new exhibition productions and presenting a plethora of events each year from its location in the heart of Copenhagen. For press and images contact Line Brædder at lb@overgaden.org.