This is how you have never seen Charlottenborg before

It will be a completely new experience to visit Kunsthal Charlottenborg over the summer. For the first time, all walls have been removed in the large south wing to make room for three giant and sliced wind turbine wings in the exhibition STRIPPED by Lea Porsager - one of Denmark’s most dynamic young artists on the international scene. The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication and a series of events, including a talk by Karen Barad organized in collaboration with Art Hub Copenhagen.

Exhibition period: June 12 – August 8, 2021

In the exhibition STRIPPED, Porsager mixes science and esoteric knowledge, including tantric meditation and quantum physics. In her works, energy, matter and body meet and clash up against each other in unseen ways as she lets new forms emerge in encounters with phenomena that we cannot perceive with our senses alone.

The exhibition opens with three cut-up wind turbine blades lying like fallen giants on the floor of Kunsthal Charlottenborg’s grand space. The emptiness of the hall and the spaces between the individual pieces are permeated by an immense, invisible force. Where the blades have been cut, openings appear: wormholes to another dimension, or female openings in the otherwise phallic shape of the blades? Porsager plays with the wind mill as a historic image of the power of the imagination – and as a present-day symbol of sustainable energy, offering assurances that our lives can continue as before as long as our energy is clean.

The works in the exhibition point beyond themselves as art: they could be machines and strange measuring instruments, or cultic objects used for obscure rituals. When Porsager’s works open themselves up to other, alternative or even alien meanings, our imagination is pushed to enter new dimensions. In that sense, the title of the exhibition – STRIPPED – can be understood as a way of kicking old habits, or of unlearning what one previously knew, thereby becoming open to what lies hidden on the other side of humanity’s understanding of ourselves as the centre of the world.

The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication edited by Milena Høgsberg as well as by a series of events, including a talk by American feminist and physicist Karen Barad, who is a great source of inspiration for Porsager’s practice.

Events in the exhibition period
June 16, 17:00
[?!]
Launch of the publication [?!] and Lea Porsager in conversation with independent curator and editor Milena Høgsberg.

June 30. juni, 20:00
Intra-dependency: A Dynamism of Inseparable Intimacy
Online talk with the feminist theorist and physicist Karen Barad. The event is organised in collaboration with Art Hub Copenhagen. 

August 4, 17:00 - 19:00
Charity Flea Market
Charity Flea Market among the wind blades arranged by Ulrikke Bak og Melanie Kitti. 

August 8, 15:00 - 17:00
TAROT
Stig Sjölund, artist and instructor at Academy of the Unknown in Stockholm, reads tarot cards for visitors in a secret room in the exhibition. 

STRIPPED is curated by Lars Bang Larsen and organised in collaboration with the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. The exhibition is supported by the Augustinus Foundation, the Beckett Foundation, the Knud Højgaard Foundation, the Obel Family Foundation, the Danish Arts Foundation and the William Demant Foundation.