EMILIA BERGMARK & MARIA GONDEK "SOAP" 📷

Thursday, September 16, 2021 4:00 PM 16:00
Saturday, October 9, 2021 5:00 PM 17:00

SIRIN Gallery x Nicolaj Bo, Frederiksberg Gammel Kongevej 103 Frederiksberg, 1850 Denmark (map)

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Emilia Bergmark & Maria Gondek, Soap. Photo: Robert Damisch.

Press release, August 2021

Sirin Gallery is thrilled to present the duo exhibition and kitchen sink drama “Soap” by artists Emilia Bergmark and Maria Gondek, hosted by kitchen manufacturer Nicolaj Bo in their Frederiksberg showroom.

If a kitchen sink could speak, what would it say?

In the exhibition ”Soap” Maria Gondek and Emilia Bergmark investigate the cultural and psychological narratives of domestic life, highlighting the kitchen as, either in real or imagined terms, the heart of the home. The concept of the ‘conversation kitchen’ (samtalekøkkenet) was introduced in Denmark in the 1990s as a step up from a utilitarian workstation and exclusive housewife territory. The ‘conversation kitchen’ was a new social gathering place for the entire family, and the grand, minimalistic designer interiors, complete with cooking islands and glossy cookbooks displays, became not only a functional top priority for the modern family but a reflection of a successful life and contemporary lifestyle.

This transition and gradual commodification of private life became a creative catalyst for both Bergmark and Gondek. The artists actively explore the grey area between commodity and art, and work to uncover the phenomenological aspects of design theory: how we shape and animate things – and, in turn, how things shape and animate us. In the exhibition ”Soap” we are introduced, among other things, to a kitchen sink with screenwriter ambitions, who is directing a play with her friends Mr. Muscle, Ariel, Ajax, and Vanish as the main protagonists. Bergmark’s sculptural sound installation humorously references British 1950’s ‘kitchen sink dramas’ and American ‘soap operas’, exposing central feminist issues of agency and division of labour. As for Gondek, she has created sculptural versions of male and female anxieties put together by pipes and tubes – materials that are integrated into the kitchen but hidden behind walls.

Gondek reflects on degrees of intimacy in the wider domain of the home, nuancing the relation between private and public, desire and control, between commodity and happiness. Thus ”Soap” is an exhibition that foregrounds the situatedness of the kitchen within the complex, emotional, political, and temporal topography of domestic life, shedding light on how the kitchen, and the home in general, can become a repository for, and representative of human anxieties, dreams, and fears. As the whole exhibition unfolds around a kitchen, the collaboration with Nicolaj Bo continues the dialogue between the field of interior design and contemporary art that both SIRIN Gallery and the two artists are engaged with.

Text by Nanna Balslev Strøjer.

Opening reception: Thursday September 16, from 16-19.
Artist talk: Wednesday 29 September, from 17.30-18.30
(Emilia Bergmark and Maria Gondek in conversation with curator Nanna Balslev Strøjer)
Exhibition period: September 16 - October 9, 2021.

Posted in 2021, Frederiksberg, Sjælland, Gallerier, Udstillinger, Billedserier