Bad Timing

Participating artists: Hannah Black, Ulla von Brandenburg, Henriette Heise, Atiéna R. Kilfa, Marie Søndergaard Lolk, Eliyah Mesayer, Jota Mombaça, Anna Munk, Lea Porsager, Bob Smith.

The exhibition Bad Timing strives to process the narrative absence of women’s artistic practices and lived experiences within art history. How can this absence take shape and become noticeable? Through historical artworks and new works by prominent contemporary artists, who aim to make absence physical, a critical, anachronistic gesture is carried out, in which past and present connect explosively.

In 1920, the Women Artists’ Retrospective Exhibition opened at the Den Frie Centre for Contemporary Art. 200 women artists exhibited almost 700 artworks. Today many of the works from the exhibition have fallen out of history. The same applies to the stories of the women who created them. This disappearance is the point of departure for the exhibition, Bad Timing—or How to Write History without Objects.

Ten prominent contemporary artists address absence as a phenomenon. Ulla von Brandenburg’s enormous textile works are the structural backbone of the exhibition and intervene in the iconic architecture of Den Frie, creating spaces within spaces. Dark markings on the textiles denote objects that are no longer there and that we can now only register the traces of.

Absence is explored in the empty landscapes and smeared figures in Anna Munk’s paintings, and in the process whereby the oceans have drained the pigment from Jota Mombaça’s textile works, leaving only eerie, ghostlike blotches. It is felt in Henriette Heise’s evasive “flanets,” in Hannah Black’s hole-riddled police reports, and Atiéna R. Kilfa’s free-standing model of a staircase. We sense it in Marie Søndergaard Lolk’s choice of fragile materials, in Eliyah Mesayer’s portal-like threshold sculpture, and in the illusion of the curator Bob Smith.

Although the exhibition’s main curatorial approach is absence, artworks by the women who took part in the exhibition in 1920 are included. Flower motifs, portraits of women and children, interiors and depictions of people absorbed in housework and homemaking form part of a large installation created by Lea Porsager in the central exhibition space. Here images from the lived lives of the women are situated among Porsager’s calibration cross sculptures or rest on cow waterbeds made of durable rubber. It is the world seen through the eyes of the women artists.

With Bad Timing, absence thus does not manifest itself as emptiness, but paradoxically in spaces filled with objects and tableaux that thematise absence. The exhibition strives to take part in the construction of this transhistorical community, engendering an approach to curating and art history that doesn’t wait for the right moment, abolishing the idea of bad timing.

Bad Timing—or How to Write History Without Objects is the second exhibition in the research-based exhibition series Ormehuller (Wormholes), curated by Ph.D. fellow and curator at Den Frie, Anna Weile Kjær. The exhibition is generously supported by the Arne V. Schleschs Foundation, the Augustinus Foundation, the Beckett Foundation, the Bodil Pedersen Foundation, the Danish Arts Foundation, Dansk Tennis Fond, the June 15 Fund, Knud Højgaards Foundation, the Novo Nordisk Foundation, the Obel Family Foundation, the Aage and Johanne Louis-Hansen's Foundation.