Jakob Kolding "Memories of the Future"
Team Gallery
This event has ended.
Kolding's collages, which have been exhibited extensively throughout Europe, take as their subject the cultural collisions inadvertently set up by the contemporary city. Kolding's work celebrates a number of urban cultural, synthetic emanations (hip-hop, graffiti, skateboarding, electronic music), as well as the aesthetics of urban studies. Hybrids of invention and documentation, renderings and diagrams, his work depicts processes and events, historical and futuristic narratives pointing to propositions and effects of urban economics, planning, architecture, ecology, transportation systems, politics, and social relations.
The materials Kolding chooses, often looking like several generations of reproductions and suggesting the possibility of mass-production, give his forms and imagery the clinical quality of propaganda used to advocate public plans. Cut-out texts and photos of individuals foregrounded against post-war, highly-designed institutional buildings, housing and landscapes raise questions - how capable is the built environment of social control and even more importantly, can an ideology be translated into practice? Kolding demonstrates how plans fall flat, pointing out architecture's and its social initiatives' possible malevolence and impotence when it comes to influencing art and society. Revealing the physical spaces of Capitalism as both depletive and ineffectual, Kolding not only elaborates Marx's argument on class struggle but questions the power of Capitalism altogether.
Our obsession with modernity - with speed, technology, with youth and with violence - and our favoritism of the new over the old, has led to the stubborn imposition of maladaptive, albeit idealistic, urban schemes, which thwart social integration and individual expression. Kolding's urbanscapes are aesthetically attractive but empty economic expedients, illustrative of the profound divisions within society. The inhabitants of Kolding's collages are alternatively shown observing - isolated - amused - rebelling - frequently stifled in a never-ending game of cultural one-upsmanship, bounded on all sides by the city's engulfing map.
[Image: Jakob Kolding "Untitled (Alice)" (2009) Lamda print mounted on aluminum, 55.5 x 86 in.]
Media
Schedule
from February 19, 2009 to March 28, 2009
Opening Reception on 2009-02-19 from 18:00 to 20:00