Kunstnernes Hus

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This year’s graduating MFA students are approaching the yearly final exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus by developing a collaborative project called The Great Indoors. The project will use the sense of home as shaped by the ongoing pandemic as main operative notion, and will seek ways to understand it and heal it.

The home, that place where we’re supposed to take shelter but that lately also feels like a prison. The home of extreme solitude and extreme connectedness, of multitasking, where your top half wears a dress shirt for the meeting and your lower half spends the day in pyjamas. Where family is a chair-swivel away from work, where intimacy appears behind a makeshift curtain, where the public space is shaped as an invisible cone of intrusion shooting from a laptop camera to a carefully chosen piece of presentable wall behind you. Maybe today another landscape will hide the mess: hello from the beach! hello from the sunset! hello from the confines of the milky way!

The Great Indoors seeks to take the home, in all of these coexisting complications, and move it into another house, the house of the artists, Kunstnernes Hus. Here the artists will enact makings, rituals and gestures in search of ways to heal. The Great Indoors will be a house that is correspondingly not tidily separated by rooms but by attitudes, moments and needs. As such, this will be a space primarily for its inhabitants in their capacity as artists: a residency, an artist residency. The artists will inhabit the space during the institution’s accessible hours and interact with each other by talking and discussing, taking on practical experiments, developing collective rituals, and building for future activities. The group will meet everyday for breakfast and sum-up everyday at dinner.

The public face of The Great Indoors will take the shape of daily broadcasts, and spontaneous social media postings. As a way to align with the world in ways that are not just digital, each day of the residency will be activated under the theme of an international day celebration corresponding with the days of the residency (between April 6 and April 27): Bicycle Day, World Voice Day, ASMR Day, Chinese language day, Earth Day, and so on. (Text: Pedro Gómez-Egaña)