Interview: Artists at Kunsthallen Nikolaj

Wiebke Loeper

Wiebke Loeper: Opening an umbrella in a room brings bad luck, say people in England, 2006. Lambda print		Wiebke Loeper: A present consisting of four parts brings bad luck, say peple in Japan, 2006. Lambda print		Wiebke Loeper: Blue glass in the window bring good luck, say people in the Caribbean, 2006. Lambda print
Wiebke Loeper: Empty bottles om the table bring bad luck, say people in Russia, 2006. Lambda print		Wiebke Loeper: Shoes on the table bring bad luck, say people in Germany, 2006. Lambda print		Wiebke Loeper: Broken porcelain brings good luck, say people in Denmark, 2006. Lambda print

Tell me about your work?

My work always belongs to the places where things come from and what is important for people, so it is a lot about identity. I’m working with photography so I’m a collector of pictures and I try to save things with the photograph. To collect things and to give it back to people. It’s a way of finding knowledge which has disappeared or certain attitudes.

I came to Copenhagen and I started to see how people do things here. I discovered, and talked to the other artists, who are coming from different countries, how they see things different - of cause - and how they believe in other things. We talked with each other about stories of good and bad luck. I was very surprised about some of the stories so I started to ask people from other countries about their ideas of good and bad luck. I then started to photograph these things, so what you see here is a collection of signs for good and bad luck from different countries. The pictures are placed on the floor because for me it’s very important to be aware of where you are going, what you meet and see. I like to show that luck can be all over and that small things can be important just as well as big things. I like to introduce people to these different believes - these is old knowledge or superstitions.

Alevtina Kakhidze

Alevtina Kakhidze: You Don't Need to Bid on the Mentioned Lots(view), 2006. Copies Alevtina Kakhidze: You Don't Need to Bid on the Mentioned Lots(detail), 2006. Copies Alevtina Kakhidze: You Don't Need to Bid on the Mentioned Lots(close up), 2006. Copies

Could you tell me about your drawings?

Yes, all my drawings are art items with their prices written on them. I saw them in an art auction. It’s about how you can get things. The auctions are open for the public so I went to the auction houses in Bredgade, where I found the different objects. The drawings with an estimated prices attached to them is objects still for sale. It shows the moment when you desire an object. It’s still not yours – you can just admire it and want it. Think: “This could be mine” but not know if you will take the next step. It’s about the dilemma of art; commodity, non-commodity, anti-commodity. On one hand they are here but on the other hand they are refused as a commodity. The work functions in different layers. You don’t need art to be yours, physically; you can keep and admire it in your memory, be fascinated by it, but you always desire things and want them to belong to you.

Aleksander Komarov

Aleksander Komarov: The Walls Are the Punishment of the Crime(Close up), 2006. Video Aleksander Komarov: Every Friday Will Be Like Evety Friday, 2006. Object

Aleksander Komarov: Every Friday Will Be Like Every Friday(Close up), 2006. Object		Aleksander Komarov: Every Friday Will Be Like Every Friday(Close up), 2006. Object		Aleksander Komarov: Sokkel, not for use, 2006. Posters

What have you made for this exhibition?

Well, my idea when I came here was that I wanted to get a view of what could be the perfect society. I went to museums here in Copenhagen, like the Arbejdermuseum and the Politimuseum, to see how people here thought about their history. One of my projects is this police poster, which are one of the first public posters from the 18th century. People tend to forget how things started.

What I noticed was that actually a lot of things have not changed that much in some ways. There are still timetables all over the place, in school, in factories, and in the public space. You have to be quite strict even if you are having dinner in a restaurant you have to leave at the right time – there’s no time, not for anybody. I slowly developed the idea to compare rules in the prisons – it’s like a micro cosmos of the real society. I started to reflect about societies. The old poster can be seen as the 18th century’s imagination of the perfect society as a prison. People do their daily work and they all function as a mechanism and it would work perfectly. In the same time it would separate people individually so you could control the even better.

To gain perfect control over other people means to eliminate their personality?

Yes, and make sure that they have no time to think about other things. So even the free time has an agenda like in prison – time to rest, time to work, time to educate, and time to sleep. I been visiting some prisons in Jutland and created an agenda of a Friday. I got this timetable that shows the timetable from one of the prisons so you can see how the whole day is constructed. Like in prison I think our days have already been planned many years in advance. Like in prison you follow some rules.

Then I developed this calendar, which appears to be where personal with a personal writing, but actually every day looks like the day before. Everything is scheduled. It starts today and continues through the exhibition. It shows how you always follow an agenda – you think you do something new but the rules will always be the same. Our lives become so dependent on the timetables – we keep an illusion that the more we control the more free time we will get, but in fact the spare time gets scheduled and framed as well.

And maybe you planned every minute of your time so you won’t have to think about what’s wrong in your life and how you could change it?

Yes, it’s like you scheduled your time, make appointments, and attempt to create your own utopia. The timetable I made is personal, with the handwriting, but it’s showing an extreme version of how we make plans for our whole lives. It becomes automatism; you’re just doing it without thinking about it anymore. This work called The walls are the punishment of the crime shows the same sentence written on the wall numerous times – basically it is to bee seen as a punishment of your own self. You repeat the same sentence and by doing that you become so abstracted from your consciousness that you eventually turn into a machine. In the 18th century they imagined how perfect the world would be if there were only one controlled system but it will reduce people to things - reduce the self by believing in the absolute.

Société Réaliste

Société Réaliste: Ponzi's(Close up), 2006. Installation

Société Réaliste: Ponzi's(Detail), 2006. Installation Société Réaliste: Ponzi's(Detail), 2006. Installation

Tell me about your project?

Our project is related to the title of the exhibition. We tried to think about the part of production – we are quite focused on political issues and economical ones. We made this project, which in fact is a production too. It’s a structure - a business - that aims to create artificial things in different contexts.

At the beginning we were very focused on Eastern Europe vs. Western Europe. We wanted to ask ourselves: “How can art economy exist in Eastern Europe?” There’s no art marked, it’s only a small part of the elite that are conducting art. We started by melting different economical structures. In the beginning of the 90ties the main economical scheme that appeared in Eastern Europe was a pyramid based one. The first thing that appeared there was casinos, banks, and very soon illegal investments came - it’s called a “Get rich quick”-scheme. The basic principal of this pyramid structure consists in paying the benefits of the first investor to the next ones and so forth – to keep it growing and growing. At some time it will reach its collapse point where the person at the top of the pyramid will take all of the money and disappear. What interested us in this pyramid principle was that it’s based on the basic principles of capitalism – but it’s illegal. The border between the illegal and legal pyramid schemes is not really clear. We melt different capital systems – the system of the casino e.g. where the winner gets money from the losers and the more losers the better money the winner gets. Also the system of a bank in regards to speculations, investments, and distributions.

We then invented a game based on these principles to dynamize the art economy in Eastern Europe. The game is a voucher game. You come in the exhibition place to Ponzi’s office, which is the name of the guy that invented these illegal investment schemes. In fact you go to the office and buy as many vouchers as you want and then write your name on them. The main principle of the game is to convince your friends, your family, and neighbours that they should visit the exhibition and bring back your vouchers to the office.

And then you will reach a higher level in the hierarchy of the pyramid?

Yes, and the office counts the number of people you send to see the exhibition. It raises the number of audience and also it’s a way of producing money. The game is fake in a way because the richer you are the higher is your chance to win.

We started by designing the game, its layout, and the office. Then we change the way of exhibiting it a little bit and exhibited the pyramid of the organization of this game. First we exhibited the basic office, then in Kiev the training room where we explained how to organize the game and so forth, in Bukarest the training room for managers, and now in Copenhagen, which is the first place in Western Europe so of cause we decided to exhibit the board of directors, the absolute top of the pyramid. We will have the meeting files - really basic economical documents, statistics, maps, and tactics to attack the Western market of art. We just try to show how you can see things from the point of view of purely structural economists.

We believe in activity, and nothing else, that can produce manifests like this. What was interesting for us by displaying it like this, the way that art economy works, was to take a critical point of view of the idea of producing utopias, producing freedom, and producing meaning for art. Art in this project has no value, no meaning. This was really important for us: To produce something without any intentions except attracting people. What is a work of art that only aims to attract people? And how is social utopias produced? We try in general to take a critical position to the question of what art means - e.g. freedom. You are in the middle of a system with certain rules even if you don’t see them. We tried to show this in a very dry way – you can’t take a position outside this structure. Just use art to make money - that’s all.

You use art as an subversive process where you reveal the weaknesses of the economical structure from an economical point of view?

Yes, e.g. we didn’t want to make a performance – it really wasn’t about selling vouchers, really organizing a game to show people how easily they can be fooled. That was not the point. We exhibit the structure and show it to people because we are in a system of secrets, a system of invisibility, and we try to show how these systems work. We also play on the ambiguity – we never say who the good or the bad guys are. We don’t think that art can do that. We are only interested in deconstructing things.

Alexandra Croitoru

Alexandra Croitoru: The Art of "Hygge"(Still), 2006. Video		Alexandra Croitoru: The Art of "Hygge"(Still), 2006. Video

Alexandra Croitoru: Immigrant(View), 2006. Multiple digital prints Alexandra Croitoru: Immigrant(Detail), 2006. Multiple digital prints

Alexandra Croitoru: Immigrant(Detail), 2006. Multiple digital prints Alexandra Croitoru: Immigrant(Detail), 2006. Multiple digital prints

What is your work about?

I think both of my works are dealing with the idea about the Other and how we see this concept in different contexts. I feel that this problem is raising in the Western society. People are talking about it especially here and concerning the political power – I think they made some new laws here in Denmark, very strict ones, and there are a lot of reactions to that. I find it interesting that people here are very political aware, much more than in Romania for instance, where we were forced to have a political attitude for many years but a very fake one. Now nobody wants to have anything to do with politics, nobody wants to vote. Especially the younger generation are totally uninterested in politic. I fell that there’s an interesting difference in this regard.

It’s also about labelling and that sometimes no matter what you do you can’t escape from certain labels. How would - or how does - it feel to wear this label every day? The point it that people can take a label, wear it for a day, and see how it feels to hold the gaze of others.

So the label is a visible sign but at the same time it’s a sign that you can easily remove – unlike foreigners who actually look different?

Exactly, but anyway I think that we are all dragging our origins, our past, and our national mistakes that we are not guilty of but that we always have to deal with. I sometimes feel, when I travel to the West, that I meet a very reserved attitude towards Romanian. Sometimes we’re associated with the gipsy culture, which can make it quite stressful to travel as a Romanian. I think after 9/11 everything changed and we are now living in a totally new context.

People tend to be more afraid of what they don’t recognise now than before?

Yes, or anyways more reserved and distanced•

Little Warsaw

Little Warsaw: INSTAURATION!, 2004-2006. Installation		Little Warsaw: INSTAURATION!, 2004-2006. Installation

Little Warsaw: INSTAURATION!(Still), 2004-2006. Installation		Little Warsaw: INSTAURATION!(Still), 2004-2006. Installation		Little Warsaw: INSTAURATION!(Still), 2004-2006. Installation