Alide dos Reis, from the series 'Elemental' (2023).
Press release, April 2024
Collega presents Forgotten by 🖤 with works by Alice dos Reis, Vala T. Foltyn, ihsan saad ihsan tahir & Ala Savashevich, curated with Kasia Sobczak from Goyki 3 Art Inkubator (Sopot, Poland).
Chants and mythologies, or scenes from old TV shows, depicting rites of passage and collective milestones. In classrooms, at dinner tables. Stories that teach us how to behave, telling us to behave. Skillfully, we polish accents, amend postures: certain things must be learnt by heart, even if it hurts. But, despite it all, something urges us to beware of that which is meant to fit comfortably in our mouth. Along the way, we also learn to forget.
Collega presents Forgotten by 🖤, a collaboration with Goyki 3 Art Inkubator. The four artists included in the exhibition engage with expressive traditions, crafts and knowledges deeply embedded in their own biographies. While they work across different techniques like metal weaving, witchcraft, embroidery and relief carving, their practices share a sense of insubordination. They turn a school lesson upside down. Archive magic objects. Capture a fleeting scene. Look back at a mountain charged with legends. Heartfully tensing the limits between remembrance and forgetfulness.
Ala Savashevich’s practice subverts the symbols through which systems of oppression sustain themselves. Born and raised in Belarus, she departs from her embodied experience of post-Soviet authoritarianism. As in many of her works, Exercise Is Technique (2024) plays with the monumentalist aesthetics which the artist encountered throughout her education. This exhibition presents two masks from the series, assembled by Savashevich with contrasting materials. She braids and combs raw linen to produce inexpressive faces, parodying the stoicism of Communist idols. Meanwhile, she uses chain mail for the back of her sculptures, applying the patience and care expected in feminized work. The video piece Pose. Position. Way. (2019), where the artist puts her body in motion, also alludes to patriarchal structures. Participating on a catwalk loaded with nuisance, she points at how the learning of feminine codes is exerted through violence, condensed in the Soviet red star. Tracing back the pain undergone through her own pedagogic path (learning how to be a woman, an artist, a citizen), Savashevich explores the entanglement of collective memory and trauma, identity and discipline.
For this occasion Vala T. Foltyn addresses a special form of embodied knowledge: her sculptural work only witches left alive (1907-ongoing) adopts the role of a tray, an amplified version of those containers graciously carried by waitresses in bars and restaurants. However, this object holds a specific history. The wooden piece originally served as the lid of a chest found in Szwedzka 8, an old villa situated in Kraków. From there, Foltyn ran Lamella — the House of Queer Arts (a collective platform that intertwined art and activism) between 2014 and 2018. Gathering objects, collecting remnants and unfolding their hidden stories is a central element in Foltyn’s practice as an artist, choreographer and witch. This enterprise, intimately attached to the concrete location of the house, has become a life-long research project, revealing unexpected resonances between Poland’s queer history and different episodes of anti-fascist resistance. only witches left alive sees the artist repurposing an old object, granting it a new life as the container of the artist’s queer archive (ashes, textiles, crockery, hallucinations, spells). The impossible tilted tray carries then a multitude of narratives and voices, tales of joy and resilience. Foltyn dates her work to 1907, the year when the villa was built, an operation of transhistorical dialogue with Szwedzka 8.
Time appears to be out of joint in ihsan saad ihsan tahir’s work. Both his ceramic vessels and his paintings on canvas exude the quietness that we associate with classical art forms. However, when looking closely, encrypted messages of loss and longing emerge. ihsan delineates a vast landscape of visual and textual references, drawing from hip-hop culture, pop iconography, personal memories and literary echoes. This act of layering is anything but fortuitous: it highlights the cultural juxtapositions enhanced by global capitalism, while also bearing witness of the intricate sense of belonging experienced by ihsan as a Danish-Iraqi artist. His big-scale plaster relief, THINGS FALL APART (2024), recently exhibited at Kunsthal Aarhus, deepened on this aesthetic strategy, challenging the idea of a monolithic cultural identity and embracing non-linear narratives. At Forgotten by 🖤 the artist presents FAMILY BUSINESS (2024). This new relief composition samples an image of an Arabic family riding a scooter (being this vehicle a recurrent motif in the artist’s imagery) with the evocative inscription that gives the work its title. Carved on the plaster, these elements become symbols of class, suburban subcultures, masculinity and displacement. Traces of a reality in transit.
Founded in 2019, Goyki 3 Art Inkubator (Sopot, Poland) is a multidisciplinary art center located in a late XIX century villa surrounded by two acres of forest park. Their program is built at the intersection of visual arts, literature, music and ecology, facilitating an international exchange with writers, scientists and other creatives. Goyki 3 functions as a meeting point where the artistic process is valued and fostered.
Collega was founded in 2022 by Lotte Løvholm and presents exhibitions developed in collaboration with international artists and curators. Departing from co-curation as practice, each collaboration embraces the methods and interests of the invited partner. In 2024 Løvholm invited Jari Malta to take the role as artistic director. This expansion follows the ethos of Collega, opening paths for new collaborations and broadening the networks of the organization. Collega is supported by Bikuben, The Danish Arts Foundation, Beckett-Fonden, William Demant Fonden, Augustinus Fonden, Rådet for Visuel Kunst and Det Obelske Familiefond.
Opening: May 9, from 5-7pm (kl. 17-19).
Exhibition period: May 9 - July 7, 2024.