KRISTINA BENGTSSON "SILENT PERFORMER" AT C.C.C.

The exhibition Silent Performer by Swedish artist Kristina Bengtsson, which has just been shown at C.C.C. in Vesterbro, Copenhagen, immediately lived upto it’s name insomuch as I was informed upon arrival that there was no exhibition text.

I was told that it is the gallery and the artist Kristina Bengtsson’s (b. 1979) intension that the show stands alone without relying on an exhibition text to prop it up, as it were; that it performs silently – like the product name of the Hoover pictured on the exhibition poster for the show. Although this way of presenting the exhibition simply alongside a carefully considered press image and exhibition map works since it performs a function in relation to framing the exhibition in a particular way – which I will explain more about later on – this might seem for other exhibitions where this is not present rather ungenerous, especially to non-art world demographics.

In any case, having spent so much time indoors recently, and being attuned to the particularities of Nordic domestic interiors of late, I was immediately struck on entering the exhibition by the closeness of the gallery to the domestic space – particularly in the Nordic regions.

I was struck by the parity between the format of the ‘white cube’ gallery space and that of the ‘Københavnerlejlighed’ – both typically spartan white spaces of modest dimensions. This parity however is no coincidence since the domestic is a dominant theme of the exhibition.

Kristina Bengtsson. Silent Performer. May/June 2020. Photo by Brian Kure.

Kristina Bengtsson. Untitled, 2020. Giclée print on Hanhnemühle paper. 28 x 35 cm. (Edition of 3 + 2 AP).
Photo by Brian Kure.

Kristina Bengtsson. Untitled, 2020. Giclée print on Hanhnemühle paper. 28 x 35 cm. (Edition of 3 + 2 AP).
Photo by Brian Kure.

Kristina Bengtsson. Untitled, 2020. Giclée print on Hanhnemühle paper. 28 x 35 cm. (Edition of 3 + 2 AP). Photo by Brian Kure.

Kristina Bengtsson. Untitled, 2020. Giclée print on Hanhnemühle paper. 28 x 35 cm. (Edition of 3 + 2 AP).
Photo by Brian Kure.

Kristina Bengtsson. Untitled, 2020. Giclée print on Hanhnemühle paper. 28 x 35 cm. (Edition of 3 + 2 AP).
Photo by Brian Kure.

The exhibition consists of a few elements – firstly five framed photographs of onions on chopping boards at various stages of preparation, taken from an aerial viewpoint. Secondly, an audio piece of a hoover performing its function is played at very high volume in the exhibition space (silent performer, not so much). This is played from vinyl on a record player over speakers. Lastly, on inspecting the exhibition map, I realize that I have already experienced the remaining element of the show – a ‘door closer’ installed in the entranceway to the gallery, similar to those installed in fire exit doors, which ensure that they stay shut at all times that they’re not in use, making it more difficult to enter the exhibition space in the first place. Finally, an important preamble to the physical exhibition itself is the exhibition poster/press image – a digital photograph which pictures the ‘silent performer’ hoover emerging into a room (or backing out of it) that could be an exhibition space or a domestic space, as if coiled and ready to strike – half menacing, half comical.

There is both a humour and a sense of hostility, pathos even, synonymous with the evocation of domestic labour here; the associations of cutting onions to crying, the aggression and noise of the ‘silent performer’ hoover, the ‘door closer’ as a kind of slapstick prop acting upon the exhibition goer’s body, resisting them even on point of entry to the gallery.

Kristina Bengtsson. Silent Performer. May/June 2020. Photo by Brian Kure.

Kristina Bengtsson. Untitled, 2020. Door closer. 4,5 x 24,5 x 6 cm. Photo by Brian Kure.

Kristina Bengtsson. Silent Performer. May/June 2020.
Photo by Brian Kure.

Indeed, the exhibition as a whole can be read as a kind of ‘set’, which, with a gallows humour reminiscent of Samuel Beckett, evokes the challenges of domestic experience and labour.

However if the exhibition can be compared to a play, there is also a curious sense of ‘distancing effect’ here reminiscent of the theatre of Bertolt Brecht. The artist chooses to play the sound of the hoover from a vinyl record setup in the exhibition space itself, thus revealing the artificial means by which the sound is played on closer inspection. The artist first ‘dramatises’ domestic experience but then subsequently undercuts any illusion that what is being ‘dramatised’ here could actually be happening in the exhibition space.

Similarly, the use of humour in general serves as a kind of ‘distancing effect’ (or to cite Brecht ‘Verfremdungseffekt’) imbuing the domestic with a sense of absurdity, uncanny even. There is even a moment of Verfremdungseffekt that happens when we read the exhibition map to find out that the ‘door closer’ installed in the entranceway of the exhibition is in fact an artwork.

Finally, one also can’t help but contemplate the possibility that the curiously animate ‘silent performer’ hoover – a normally inanimate object – is it in fact intended as a kind of wry stand-in for the artist herself? If so, what implications would a woman’s semi-ironic self-identification with a hoover with that product name have on a reading of the exhibition as a kind of comment on social mores in relation to gender?

Kristina Bengtsson. Silent Performer. May/June 2020.
Photo by Brian Kure.

Kristina Bengtsson. Silent Performer, 2020. Vinyl 12″. 6.16 min. Photo by Brian Kure.

The predominance of the ‘silent performer’ hoover in the exhibition also brings to mind the theatre of Brecht, in the sense of his keen interest with the subject matter of machinery in his dramatic work, and his modus operandi, mentioned above, the distancing or Verfremdungseffekt. As the playwrite himself reflects in The Messingkauf Dialogues, the fullest exposition of his philosophy of theatre:

“His love of machinery, which let him in for frequent blame and occasional excesses of praise, was something he only showed when it allowed him to use his scenic imagination. He had a marked appreciation of simplicity… which corresponded to the simplicity of his objective: to expose the world’s mechanism on a grand scale and to copy it in such a way that it would be more easily serviced.” – Bertolt Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues (London: Eyre Methuen, 1965), p. 65.

Like Brecht, Bengtsson suggests the ‘mechanisms of the world’ in this exhibition at C.C.C. in relation to her expose of the domestic with a dose of her own brand of distancing effect, in a way that is both heart-warmingly funny, and painfully evocative.

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Kristina Bengtsson. Silent Performer. Poster.

Kristina Bengtson:
Silent Performer
May 14 – June 11, 2020

C.C.C., HADERSLEVGADE 43,
1671 Copenhagen

Find more information about this exhibition in the calendar.

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