WHEN : 2nd March – 27th April
WHERE : David Pestorius Projects
David Pestorius is pleased to present a new exhibition by Copenhagen-based artist Jens Haaning (*1965).
Central to Haaning’s project is a socio-political dimension that is highly conceptual, non-didactic, and often Zen-like in its simplicity and degree of abstraction. The artist opens up to analysis the structures of modern society and the dynamics of power via key themes, including immigration, racism, intercultural dialogue, nationalism, and the relation between global capitalism and local economies.
Since 2004, Haaning has painted the name of the country in which he is exhibiting on gallery walls in giant black capital letters. The effect is intriguing: the typography appears anonymous yet has been specially designed, and at over a metre high with nothing else on display in the gallery, it has a strangely commanding presence: a bit like encountering a mirror, one feels self-conscious confronted by our own sense of place, history, and the here and now. Haaning’s ‘Australia’, however, has a very particular resonance, coming as it does when questions around Indigenous sovereignty, immigration, and ‘Islamisation’ (rendered acute by the recent visit of controversial Dutch politician Geert Wilders), are increasingly in the public consciousness. For Brisbane, Haaning will tap into this moment, extending the ‘Australia’ wall beyond the limits of the gallery. The end result is deliberately confusing — it appears as if the builder of the house has misread the plans — and serves to complexify the inside/outside experience of the International Style architecture and associated sense of transparency and openness, which is so indebted to Modernist ideals of the public sphere.
