Back to All Events

MARIE KØLBÆK IVERSEN "BIRTH OF MUSPELINA"


  • Annual Reportt, København Åboulevard 44 København, 2200 Denmark (map)

Press release, April 2018

It is our great pleasure to invite you to the opening of the exhibition Birth of Muspelina by Marie Kølbæk Iversen. The opening will take place on Wednesday May 9th, at 18.00. At the opening Marie will do a reading from her new artist's book.

The exhibition brings together two new works by Marie Kølbæk Iversen: a unique artist's book, Birth of Muspelina, and the composite film work Star Messenger. Both works explore liminal states of destruction and becoming to suggest a collapse of scientific vision with the spiritual/mythological visionary.

Star Messenger
Work-in-progress; HD single-channel animated video loop; 11’53’’.

Expanding the artist’s research exploring the transformative potentialities of fright encountered through traumatic and shamanist processes, Star Messenger proposes a softening of the historical western divide between the rational and the irrational, the material and the magical. In 1610 Galileo Galilei published his accounts of discovering four of Jupiter’s moons. He titled the publication “Siderius Nuncius” – star messenger – thus naming the book after Io, the innermost of the moons. Over the course of two months Io had visually – slowly, but consistently – conveyed her message to him: That she is orbiting Jupiter. That the Earth is not the centre of the Universe.

Marie Kølbæk Iversen attributes the English translation of the title of Galileo’s opus magnum to her dreamy video work Star Messenger, whereby she questions what we know and how we know it, and suggests a collapse of scientific vision with the spiritual/mythological visionary: Both draw on sightings obtained through extraordinary set-ups that may challenge habitual world-views. Star Messenger is a work-in-progress produced in extension of Kølbæk Iversen’s artistic research at Oslo National Academy of the Arts and Aarhus University. It is a log of dissociative visions obtained by labouring women and will evolve during the years to come. Iterations of the work have previously been shown at PS/Y and LUX (London, GB, 2017), Kunsthall Oslo (NO, 2018), and the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (NO, 2018).

Birth of Muspelina
Is a work-in-progress; unique artist’s book; artist’s writing and found imagery. Birth of Muspelina interweaves various historical and contemporary literary and scientific sources into a first person narrative of transgression and transformation.

About the artist: Marie Kølbæk Iversen (b. 1981, Herning, Denmark). Visual Artist MFA from the Department of Time-Based Media at Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2008. Artistic research fellow at the Academy of Fine Art at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Aarhus with the project “Neo-worlds: the Other-directed potentialities of Fright" as of October 2017.

Recent projects and exhibitions include: Soon Enough, Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, 2018; Water from the Waist Down, Kunsthall Oslo, 2018; Star Messenger, PS/Y + LUX, London, 2017, “Io/I” and Matrilineal Collapse, PARMER, New York, 2017; Surfacing Earth, Röda Sten, Göteborg, 2016; The Eight Climate (What Does Art Do?), The 11th Gwangju Biennial, Gwangju, 2016; Spin and the Wolf, Overgaden, 2016; Transformer (solo), Brandts, 2015; Mirror Therapy (solo), Fotografisk Center, 2015; Biennale de l’image en mouvement, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, and MONA, Hobart, Australia, 2014-15; Consciousness, ARTEFACT ‘14, STUK Kunstencentrum, Leuven, Belgium, 2014; Dexter Bang Sinister, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, 2012; Execution – into decapital (solo), IMO, 2012.

We hope to see you here!

Yours truly,
Annual Reportt

Opening: Wednesday May 9th, 2018, from 6pm. (with live reading by Marie Kølbæk Iversen).
Exhibition period: May 9th - June 2nd, 2018.