Andreas Albrectsen & Jakob Kolding
Installation views. Arnstedt, Östra Karup, Sweden
In his new works, Albrectsen draws evocative word combinations lifted from websites that use CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart). These randomly generated word combinations filter anthropoid users from malicious spam bots. Surprisingly, the fragmented CAPTCHAs originate from physical library books and are isolated words seized from their literary context. The authored words, too distorted by time and tear and left unidentifiable by AI scanners, are sent back to the internet users as online Turing tests, who in return help digitise books for Google. In Recaptures, there is an initial familiarity in what we encounter: the Latin script, the black-on-white quality of charcoal on paper as typical of either writing or drawing, the associated traces of a human hand and the excess charcoal dust mouth-blown across the paper. The graffiti-esque aesthetics of the drawn text result from a stencil-like tool that holds the porous vine-wood charcoal substance at bay.
nudism directed
gravity spooned
laughter tackled
By transferring the CAPTCHA words from the screen onto paper, Albrectsen invites a potential poetic reading, as they are restored in their original cellulose medium but in a new and less restrictive context. Just like the spam poetry, or spoems, that emerged in the early 2000s by internet-based authors who composed phrases from subject lines or phishing emails, the non-linear language of the found wordings used by Albrectsen also relates in spirit to the cut-out writings of William S. Burroughs, T. S. Eliot and the early Dadaists. Fittingly enough, Dada and data – nonsense and information – are arguably the two driving opposite forces demanding our attention in today's digital media landscape.Where artificial intelligence creates problems while solving others, only humans create poetry from boredom or curiosity. This human-versus-machine complex raises future questions: If language is grounded in experience and computers are writing for humans – how will meaning continue to morph? Can it morph until it becomes so unrecognisable that any reading is nearly impossible, leaving us with an abyss that even poetry or nonsense cannot fill? Regardless of this question, in Recaptures, the viewer can actively decipher or bypass the works without being questioned on their humanity – or lack thereof.
Anna Bella Geiger / Andreas Albrectsen / Tamar Guimãres & Kasper Akhøj /
Carla Zaccagnini / Renata Lucas / Otavio Schipper
Curated by Andreas Albrectsen & Laura Goldschmidt.
Landline is a compound word that forms a drawing in one’s mind. It is a horizontal contour that cuts through space, defining the ground and the above. Drawing a line is simple enough, but to spatially define a void is an abstract thought. One needs to reinvent physics symbolically. A crudely drawn connection between two points is all it takes to make a horizon, to give the emptiness direction – a future and a past. Where a line can be a communication tool between existing and alternative worlds, this exhibition connects a long-distance call between physical, social, and spiritual structures. The artists’ works touch on various themes, such as urbanisation, displacement, memories of technology and its social and esoteric relations. The exhibition title refers to the undersea internet cables that carry data across the Atlantic Ocean, connecting the South American and European continents. The transmitted data, a non-linear stream of human interrelations, travels deep below international waters and beyond our awareness. Approximately seventy-one per cent of the surface of the Earth consists of oceans, yet humans have only explored a fraction of the oceanic floor. Scientists have investigated far greater percentages of planet Mars than the seabeds on Earth[1]. Our internet infrastructure – the arteries of modern globalisation – lies in absolute darkness.
On the initiative of Dom Pedro II, the last monarch of Brazil, the first telegraphic submarine cable arrived by boat at Copacabana beach in 1873. The new era of long-distance communication also coincided with the rise of the spiritualist beliefs of the late nineteenth century, which was rooted in the mediumship between the material and spiritual plane. In Brazil, the followers of Allan Kardec’s spiritist doctrine became widely popular and spread across the country. The telegraph cable’s ability to transmit messages across the Atlantic was a wonder of the Second Industrial Revolution. But the uncharted technology was simultaneously associated with a paranormal potential – as a landline to the otherworldly. “The invisibility and intangibility of electric current, and its capacity to collapse time and space into a single, continuous plane of reference, provided the perfect analogy for the existence of the human soul beyond the body. After all, if telegraphic technologies could harness electromagnetic forces in order to communicate intentional messages, why should it not be possible to develop comparable techniques in order to communicate with the dead?”[2]
From ancient history until the Renaissance, the Atlantic Ocean was seen as a mythological void in the West. It was known as the frontiers of the world, the sea of darkness, and the passageway between the old and the so-called New World. The term Atlantic derives from ‘The sea of Atlas’ – after the Greek mythological Titan who holds the heavens on his shoulders. The imaginary lost continent of Atlantis was described as ‘the Island of Atlas’ by Plato in Timaeus and Critias. The speculations of an undiscovered civilisation continued to resurface throughout the early colonial age when Europeans identified Atlantis as the Americas. To this day, fantasies of a submerged continent keep the myth of Atlantis afloat in online news media. With high-speed connection comes the risk of over-information, and our cognitive sense of urgency and factuality adapts. Atlantis-2 was the name of the first submarine fibre-optic cable system to connect Brazil and Europe with internet. It launched in February 2000 and was disconnected again in January 2022 when substituted by the superior EllaLink cable. But where its name may have been a metaphor for the internet utopia of the early 2000s, it is now a fitting metaphor for the looming eco-collapse that the world faces. Though the 8,500-kilometre-long cable is currently in the process of being retrieved, many others of the 500+ privately owned cables are prone to remain buried in the ocean as infrastructural ruins of human civilisation. / Andreas Albrectsen
[1]‘Why we have better maps of Mars than of the seafloor – and what USGS is doing to change that’, 17 November 2023, https://www.usgs.gov/news/science-snippet/why-we-have-better-maps-mars-seafloor-and-what-usgs-doing-change
[2] Jeremy Stolow. Wired Religion: Spiritualism and Telegraphic Globalization in the Nineteenth Century, p.89. In Stephen Streeter, John Weaver, and William Coleman, eds. Empires and Autonomy: Moment in the History of Globalization (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2019)
Inkjet print on Post-it notes. 276 X 385 cm.
Installation view, Fotografisk Center.
The work is based on a private snapshot taken by the artist himself from the top of the World Trade Center in New York on 17 August 2001. In the foreground of the image are the rooftops of New York's Wall Street financial district. The image is scaled up to a size matching the dimensions of the window through which it was taken and printed on 1,750 post-it notes hung on the wall. Over the course of the exhibition period the work will slowly disintegrate and the motif will disappear as the glue on the post-it notes loses its grip causing the notes to fall down onto the floor. The work points to the transience of photography and memory and suggests disappearance on several levels: both in terms of the temporary nature of the work and its physical collapse over time in the course of the exhibition, as well as a concrete disappearance in real life since the subject of the work and the view from the original World Trade Center no longer exist. / Signe Kahr Sørensen, 2023.
Market Debut 2023 / Spritmuseum Stockholm
Untitled (Folders VI) Dry pastel on paper. 141 X 216 cm.
Installation view C.C.C Gallery.
Untitled (Folders VI) is a grey-toned pastel drawing depicting a desert landscape used as a digital desktop backdrop. Here, a deliberate cluster of folder icons disturbs the surface of the unoccupied sandy terrain. Coloured by the whiteness of the background paper, the folders create a tangible negotiation between drawing and negative space. The folders icons are composed after a 17th-century painting by Willem Kalf: Still Life with The Drinking-Horn of Saint Sebastian Archers Guild, Lobster and Glasses.
Where the original painting was a monument to luxury, a porous wasteland has replaced the baroque arrangement in Albrectsen’s drawing. The extravagant lifestyle represented by the Pronk still-life is reduced to dust as Albrectsen draws with powders made from crushed dry pastels. It is also a strategic choice of material that mimics the fleeting nature of desert sand. The symbolic contradiction between the ostentatious plate of excess and the drained landscape seems to echo the conflicting realities of today. The wristwatch cursor floating on the left side of the work is not telling time - but a tell-tale of technological and ecological impermanence.
Graphite on paper. 114,5 X 215,5 cm.
"(...)In Andreas Albrectsen’s work Untitled (Elke) we are presented with a pencil drawing of a weather chart showing the wind directions above Europe on 14 October 2022. Albrectsen used computer-animated graphics from ECMF (European Centre for Medium-Range Forecasts) as the model for his work. It is a diagram based on data from satellite monitoring and then mapped by hand, using pencil on paper. The eddies and changing air pressures are represented by greyish patches plotted faintly in across national frontiers. The hundreds of arrows, forming a dense pattern of movement, follow the atmospheric logic of the wind. But, at the same time, it is tempting to see the arrows as tumultuous connections between nations. The arrow is a universal symbol of direction but also, ultimately, a weapon. One meteorological consequence of war is the destruction of weather stations and observatories, leaving the scientists with 'blind spots' and thus making weather forecasts less reliable in the absence of data.
The drawing encapsulates both a forecast and a process – a before, during and after all in one. The precise date of the forecast is not in itself significant and should be seen rather as a geopolitical prediction and a need to put this particular period of time into perspective. The autumn of 2022 was marked by major ideological power struggles in Europe, Brazil and the US, where both climate and democratic principles were key voting issues. The title of the work (Elke) refers to the name of an actual windstorm that hit Scandinavia, the UK, Estonia and Russia in the days of 16 and 17 October. Elke was not in itself disastrous, but may be seen as a proxy for the sociostructural currents that, in the long run, may prove to be so." /Excerpt from exhibition text.
Once in a decade, a rare botanical phenomenon occurs in California’s Death Valley. As the spectacular outcome of an unusually wet rainy season, large quantities of wildflower seeds that have lain dormant deep down in the desert soil meet the right conditions to germinate, sprout and blossom. It is a superbloom. Intuitively, the idea of a blossoming desert seems contradictory. As a botanical impossibility, it is in radical contrast to the general perception of the dry and infertile desert landscape. Yet it is surprisingly real.
A similar exercise of creating visions of contrasting ideas that question our sense of authenticity lies at the heart of Danish-Brazilian artist Andreas Albrectsen’s work. Revolving around a conceptual approach to drawing, Albrectsen examines the visual cultures of our time, their historical references and interlinked paradoxes – predominantly taking the internet and its embedded user experience as his theoretical point of departure. With his use of digital images from operating systems, search engines and social media, the drawings spring from the screen landscape but are also physical manifestations of ideas and time. The manual accumulation of time is also very present in Albrectsen’s drawing technique. Through a slow, meticulous and extremely labour-intensive translation process, Albrectsen masterfully transforms the digitally pixeled image into a pastel drawing, always maintaining a strictly grey-scaled palette. In his works, Albrectsen uses a particular dry pastel powder, which he grinds into fine pigmented dust and applies to the paper with repetitious gentle brushstrokes. This technique enables the drawings to encapsulate a porous and desiccated expression – a texture similar to the feel of desert sand. This subtle associative relation is something Albrectsen likes to emphasise in his work methodology, always trying to draw symbolic parallels to the medium and the materials he uses.
For his first solo show at Anita Schwartz Gallery, Andreas Albrectsen presents a new body of works consisting of three large-scale pastel drawings, each an impressive size of 140 x 218 cm. They were all produced in Rio de Janeiro during a three-month residency. The drawings present slightly different versions of a picture-perfect desert landscape used as a desktop background on a computer screen. Conceptually, the works combine elements of the still-life genre with a digital desktop environment, creating a modern-day vanitas. This juxtaposition is notably present in the two drawings Untitled (Folders IV) (2022) and Untitled (–) (2022). At first sight, there is something peculiar about the compositions of the white documents and folder icons that hover together on top of the pastel powdered desert desktop. The accumulated icons form undefined silhouettes, sharply contrasted against the porous and shadowy dunes. In Untitled (Folders IV), the delicately outlined composition – abstract as it may appear – refers to the iconic Northern Renaissance oil painting The Ambassadors (1533) by Hans Holbein the Younger. The double portrait is considered a forerunner of the later style known as stilleben or more popularly called Nature Morte (dead nature). Another element that stands out is the hourglass. As an archaic measurer of time, and a classical memento mori symbol, the tool is reduced to a pixelated cursor stuck in space in between mediums. As an actual container of sand, the hourglass relates to the desert scenery and the dust grains from the pastel-covered surface.
Untitled (–) (2022) also references a classical still life painting: Cornelis Gijsbrecht’s Trompe l´oeil. Letter Rack with a Barber-Surgeon’s Instruments (1668). Again, the folder composition appears as an apparition in the desolate wasteland. On the left side, Albrectsen has implemented a small icon resembling the digital tool of the magnifying glass, indicating the action of zooming out – a common metaphor for a non-present mental state of being. In computer terminology, the folder icon is referred to as a User Interface Metaphor (UIM) and is designed to trigger immediate recognition. Ironically these UIM icons now represent obsolete and historicised objects, far away from the immaterial and contactless reality of the present day. In Untitled (Poof) (2022), this ghostlike sense of disappearance or digital erosion is also present. In a similar uninhabited desert scene, a singular white cartoonish cloud, digitally designed and attached to an arrow-shaped cursor, hovers over the dunes like a genie. The icon represents the disposal of an unknown screen element, evaporating from the desert heat and into the ‘trash’. Keeping in mind that computer screens consist of 70 percent silica sand – a primary component of Silicon Valley offices – Albrectsen makes a connection with the sand of Death Valley and that of our digitalised office culture, drowning us in endless online scrolls.
When looking at the three drawings installed – sparsely and widely spread out in the space – one cannot help draw parallels with the surrounding white-cube architecture and the internal metaphor of the desert. As in nature, the viewer must walk a certain distance to look closer at the objects appearing on the horizon, but by doing so, the viewer might walk towards something that was never there in the first place, awakening this unreal feeling of a distant, surreal mirage. Albrectsen’s new body of work is not so much a reminder of the transience of life as it is a comment on the eternal presence of our avatars and personal information that will live on forever digitally. Like the visible void surrounding a photocopied page, or the monotone grey desktop display from early Macintosh operating systems, Albrectsen’s drawings remain haunted by their contextual origin. But just as in the process of mass reproduction, the generational loss of information over time eventually allows for an alternative and more autonomous visual presence.The seemingly inexhaustible container of symbolism that the desert and its aesthetic theoretical framework represent becomes Albrectsen’s muse as he digs deeper into and around its evident internet analogies. Throughout the history of philosophy and literature, not least in postmodern rhetoric, the desert landscape has been the object of hundreds of metaphors and tales of dystopia harbouring an overall sense of philosophical immanence: the desert as arid wilderness, a site of geographical extremity, a sacred and biblical place, the birthplace of man, a metaphor for infinite standstill, of solitude and hopelessness, an existential terrain, a speculative topology (Nietzsche), a site of deterritorialisation (Deleuze and Guattari), an object of sheer, but dry, aesthetic desire.[1] It is within this context, and that of the superbloom – from which the exhibition takes its title – that Albrectsen makes his point. Comparing the endless internet search with the desert – an infinitely misleading place, with no maps or clear directions, a place that will consume you and leave you drained – there is an element of loss and melancholy in the drawings. By introducing the vibrant phenomenon of the superbloom, a natural outcome of the utmost ecological resilience, Albrectsen creates a sharp contrast, like a tiny rippling effect of excitement, suggesting the possibility of radical change. / Aukje Lepoutre Ravn.
[1] Aidan Tynan, The Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy: Wasteland Aesthetics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), pp. 1–3.
To man alone, of all animated beings, has it been given, to grieve, to him alone to be guilty of luxury and excess; and that in modes innumerable, and in every part of his body. Man is the only being that is a prey to ambition, to avarice, to an immoderate desire of life, to superstition,—he is the only one that troubles himself about his burial, and even what is to become of him after death. By none is life held on a tenure more frail; none are more influenced by unbridled desires for all things; none are sensible of fears more bewildering; none are actuated by rage more frantic and violent. (Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis, Book VII)
Close-ups of a child's foot with bees on their way out of the hexagonal cells, slowly feeling their way out of the holes on the foot. The sleeping child's body in the dark room is bathed in images. As the child is cradled in sleep, the sleeping body is encapsulated in the projection, and the reproductive work that lies in the care of the child is reflected in the reproductive work carried out by the bees through pollination. Do bees dream of sleeping children?
Mia Edelgart's video work Hearts in Tiny Chests (PS) Pollination Service (2017-22) stems from a study of bees' function in the maintenance of ecosystems and of human's relationship to bees as a mythological, practical and now endangered species. "Not having honey is the least of our problems" as formulated in an article on the impact of climate change on the decline in the global population of bees. Bees - and not just the honey bee - are vital pollinators of all types of plants and crops, but industrial agriculture in particular has contributed to the decline in bee populations globally. Edelgart's video revolves around the question of how we are connected to and can show care for caregivers of other species. On the one hand, it tries to visually capture the close relationship between flowers, bees and humans through footage from the University Gardens at Frederiksberg where a number of hobby beekeepers visit the hives and bees crawl around in bulging flowers with their yellow pollen pants - on the other hand it shows Edelgart's attempt to find a way to address the bees and the challenges man-made changes of ecosystems have posed to them, e.g., by converting caring gestures like reading aloud to them. The work thus also relates to the loss that lies in the experience that having knowledge and language about the bees' way of life does not necessarily contain a safeguard against destabilization and destruction of their living conditions. The disorientation of bees resulting from the use of neonicotinoides (a special type of pesticides, which have, however, been taken out of use in Denmark after the production of this work), is reflected in the video's searching format with overlapping images, inversions and collapse of registers – like groping in the dark.
There is a similar nocturnal atmosphere in Andreas Albrectsen's series of film strip frottages (Untitled) Sleeper (2022). The frottages, mounted horizontally, bear resemblance to railroad tracks cutting through the landscape, something which the title also alludes to with its ambiguous connotations of railway sleepers, sleeping wagons, and the state of sleep. At the same time, they carry with them a secretive relation to imagination and dreaming. Although it could be the representation of a landscape, it is impossible to decode what is on the film strip's images. Of the photographic reproduction, only the direct imprint of the surface and contours of the negative remains; rubbing the graphite chunk over the paper with the strip underneath. Where Max Ernst in his Histoire Naturelle (ca. 1925-26) evoked motifs from wooden floors and leaves and made a surrealistic natural history of fantasy beings and dream-like tableaux, in Albrectsen's works for this show under the same title the medium becomes the motif itself. The landscape here is latent or it lies dormant as an imagination embedded in the negative or is a faint afterimage visible to the inner gaze.
As Foucault already pointed out in Order of Things (1966), in which he examines how we arrange things with words, every natural history is at the same time a story of the human being who recorded it and the notions that presupposed it. In connection to this he refers to the well-known surrealist motto "beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella.” Our relationship with the outside world of which we are a part is therefore marked by paradoxes; we must at once acknowledge our deep entanglement with the world and try to lift ourselves out of it in order to understand it. A shameful humanistic drama seems to unfold these years, where it is increasingly clear how that very human (the European anthropos) who has seen himself as a neutral center of enlightenment and development has exploited both the globe, others species and marginalized, minority and enslaved groups that have been used, wasted. It points to a close connection between the ideal of the Enlightenment to gather and categorize knowledge of everything and then the systematic over-consumption of resources that accompanies industrialization and the growth logic of capitalism, which together have given rise to the designation of the anthropocene or rather capitalocene age, we are now in. And as long as we hold on to the special status of humans in relation to other species and the outside world, it is also an age of loneliness, the eremocene. Albrectsen's and Edelgart's works in the exhibition Histoire Naturelle open up to visualizing and imagining new connections and ways of expression – or maybe it's something I dreamt. / Anne Kølbæk Iversen
Graphite pencil on paper, 215,5 x 114,5 cm I
Collection of The New Carlsberg Foundation
I believe it was sunny when I went to see Andreas Albrectsen’s exhibition at C.C.C. in Vesterbro, Copenhagen a couple of weeks ago. I had gone swimming in the morning - a new routine I have caught - or that has caught me - during the current lockdown. Even though the weather was fair, compared to how it can be and mostly is in Denmark by early March, I know we didn’t talk about the weather in its typical sense. Instead, I joined the artist and the gallerist in a conversation about the materialities of the weather forecast and how it relates data, visualisation, and "the weather" as an embodied phenomenon or situation.
C.C.C. excels in minimal and often also quite conceptual shows, and Bella is no exception. The exhibition entails two new works, meticulously hand drawn by Albrectsen: the central piece of the exhibition Untitled (Bella) 2021, a single large-scale pencil drawing that is displayed in the front room of the gallery, and the smaller drawing Untitled (UK Forecast) 2020, which is hung in the back - as a b-side or appendix to the main attraction. Both drawings depict predictions of weather, in Europe and the UK, respectively, but are different both in style and in how the data is abstracted and visualized. Where Untitled (UK Forecast) resembles the visualized forecasts you would normally see on TV with the lands of Britain covered by clip-art-like icons for rain - however in black and white - Untitled (Bella) rather resembles a screengrab of a data-stream.
An exhibition displaying weather forecasts seems timely at a moment when most people have grown unaccustomed to small-talk, whilst simultaneously having gained expertise in talking about predictions of infection curves, risk, and exponential growth as they relate to the day-today experience of lockdown and social distancing. With only a single work in the main gallery space and no accompanying text to contextualize the works (and silence the visitor) one is invited to take another look and to share his/her thoughts.
Untitled (Bella) is based on the data-driven predictions and visualizations of a forecast of wind directions, extracted from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts at the end of December 2020, when the storm Bella hit the UK and the Netherlands, as well as parts of Norway and France. In the drawing, the expected wind directions, as well as high and low pressures, are represented by thousands of arrows of differing size, effecting a dynamic flow of distributed movements and shifting intensities across the surface. Reaching wind speeds of more than 100 mph and resulting in flooding chaos across the UK, as well as collapses of electricity lines, the storm Bella provided a dramatic backdrop at the turn of a year marked by corona outbreaks, US presidential elections, and the culmination of Brexit, in addition to otherwise typical anticipations tied up with the turning of a calendar year.
The turbulence of the storm, however, is not directly apparent in the work. In effect, there is a clash between the neutrality of Albrectsen’s work with its quiet drama and the images of flooding and wreckage left by the storm. The represented cartography underneath the arrows: Europe, North Africa, a snippet of Russia and the southern tip of Greenland, lies unaffected by the arrows dancing above it. The black and white technique of the pencil drawing only enhances the abstraction. Bella - a perfect storm, not because of her spectacular, sublime fury, but rather in her guise as information, data.
We talk about the tradition of cloud studies in painting and how the metaphor of “the cloud” inevitably echoes any representation of actual clouds and skies to this day. As a view from above, the work turns traditional studies of clouds and skies upside down, reversing the perspective from a phenomenological, or symbolic, to a scientific and abstract one. Instead of displaying what has been referred to as “psycho-meteorological” states of romantic landscape paintings and literature, it has a matter-of-factness leaving it to the viewer to invest sentiment and meaning. It’s the cloud as a form of thinking. Untitled (Bella) in this way expresses the virtual capacity of the forecast in more than one sense: as an abstracted image far removed from the embodied experience of “the weather” on land or at sea, and as the depiction of a simulated future scenario, which may not be identical to the actual weather to come. A virtual storm, a potential storm, not unlike the potential outbreaks, which governments repeatedly warn against.
Looking at the drawing: its grids and shades and all the lively arrows scurrying over the plane, I try to wrap my mind around the relations between representations and predictions of the sky and the technologies and methods employed to produce them. Even though the numerical predictions of today’s weather forecasts, projecting behaviour of clouds, winds and pressures are not cloud-based, they are the result of thorough and complex correlations of data. Inspired by the contrasts between symbolic and scientific approaches, I cannot help but imagine a weather model based on data collected from on-site mobile devices, combining statistical data with idiosyncratic descriptions and reports.
When standing close, one notices that Untitled (Bella) is equipped with not just one, but two grids: the cartographic grid provided by the forecast service, as well as that of the artist, who has divided the image into no less than 128 fields, each measuring 13,5 x 14,5 cm for his translation of the image to paper. That grid is evidence of the labour inherent in the production of the drawing, a trace of a bodily presence and the human factor in the making of the otherwise abstract visualization. In this respect, the work of Albrectsen connects to Lucy Siyao Liu’s A Curriculum on the Fabrication of Clouds (2017-) and Nanna Debois Buhl’s Cloud Behaviour (2018) and On Thunderclouds (2020), similarly drawing attention to the fabrications of forecasting methods and how human computing relates to increasingly complex computing systems and networks.
Thinking of the layers of virtual images behind the perceivable ones, I emerge back into the soft sunlight of the street. Looking up, there are no arrows and no grids in the sky, only a couple of fluffy white clouds. It’s a beautiful, fair day. Bella. / Anne Kølbæk iversen
Untitled (Dynamic Desert II) 2020
Charcoal and pasteldust on paper, 140 x 246 cm
Collection of Malmö Art Museum (SE)
Untitled (Dynamic Desert) 2020
Charcoal on paper, 140 x 232 cm
Region Skåne public Art Collection.
Exhibition view: Galleri Arnstedt, May 2020
Untitled (Folders I - II) 2019
Charcoal on paper, 140 x 232 cm each
Collection of SMK - National Gallery of Denmark.
Exhibition view: Edstranska foundation scholarship 2019
(...)"The word screensaver gives associations to screen memory or replacement memory. This is a psychoanalytical phenomenon where a completely banal and ‘innocent’ memory has replaced a traumatic one. To maintain the illusion of control, we ‘forget’ the trauma. Ironic, isn’t it? Computers comprise the most effective preservers of memory thought up by man to date, infinitely greater than the metaphor for human memory and knowledge, the brown Library of Alexandria. In the 1950s in Aniara, Harry Martinsson envisaged humanity heading for space with a Mima, a gigantic keeper and viewer of memories as the only guide. At present, we each sit with our personal mimes in our laps. But far removed from the tragic grief of Miman’s guard, we stare into screensavers and recall – nothing. Andreas Albrectsen reminds us of our condition." - Excerpt from text by Gertrud Sandqvist
Reversed Endings 2020 - 2024
Graphite pencil & charcoal on sealed paper pads, 26 X 36 cm
Reversed Endings is an ongoing series of drawings based on mirrored end titles. The endings originate from 20th-century films produced during times of censorship. The drawn image appears on the first page of a blank paper pad - fresh from the factory with its edges glued together, holding the weight of twenty unturned pages. The writing in reverse is both a public statement and a private examination of the past echoing into the present. It lies somewhere in between a protest sign and a personal cue card.
How To Move Forward?
- Text by: Anna Vestergaard Jørgensen
Big Brother Brazil, Hurricane Irma, the Truman Show, and DIY slime: the motifs of Andreas Albrectsen’s meticulous works in carbon, pencil, and pigment powder range widely. Albrectsen found the inspiration for his works in Google’s image search tool based on the company’s own Year in Search 2017: statistics on the issues, people, films, etc. most frequently searched for. In other words, a kind of statistical evidence of the themes most often entered in the search field of the Internet giant. In all their almost tragicomic diversity, Albrectsen’s works directly address our times: how we consume and search, are worried and entertained – as individuals and as humankind.’Privacy is political’ people used to say. ’Privacy is marketing’ they probably say at Google. But in Albrectsen’s work, something else is afoot: the mass searches are brought back to the intimate sphere created by the drawings and where questions such as ‘How to move forward?’ perhaps first emerged. In the remediation of the image flows from the news media and the entertainment industry to the authenticity and originality of the drawing, there is a short break from the acceleration of time, searches, money, entertainment. Here the drawing becomes a tool with which to ’look’ – different from scrolling using your index finger on the mouse or, in the case of the phone, your thumb. And this ’looking’ – and sometimes ’overlooking’, forgetting – is a general theme in Albrectsen’s practice, which often circles around themes such as memory and the relationship between history and the contemporaneous as well as the shift in meaning which images, in proper Kuleshov style, are capable of producing in the mind of the viewer.
The works in How To Move Forward? constitute in many ways yet another layer of the surveillance culture represented by Google. It is a partial mapping of the surveillance itself, a fragmented overview of the most pressing issues in a global context, a kind of glimpse of the subconscious of humankind. For what exactly fascinates humankind? What remains forgotten? In 1930, Sigmund Freud published Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (in English: Civilization and Its Discontents) where he described everything that a well-functioning society is unable to deliver, which, in simple terms, can be boiled down to the happiness of the individual. In other words, if you go along with Freud, there is a disparity between the individual and society. What, then, is the relationship that emerges between the individual and society in Albrectsen’s works? Is it the surveillance of the individual – like the two partly anonymised people in an unmade bed – which ultimately contributes to sustaining a society that only functions when everyone is watching everyone else? Or is it the case that society will not function when individuals are allowed to abandon themselves to the quick fixes provided by search engines?The question mark in the exhibition title How To Move Forward? is nothing if not significant. For it is in the very question mark that the works come together. The exhibition is not a ’how to’ guide; it is an open question: How? Where? Whence? Albrectsen’s works do not provide the answers; instead it could be argued that they are working within the context of the question mark: they expose the flaws of the oracle replies offered by the search engines and the blurry boundary between crisis and entertainment, reality and fantasy. Perhaps it is precisely in this questioning space, in the opportunity for critical reflection created by Albrectsen’s works that an alternative to the endless searches can be found. It is not an alternative with no questions asked, but an alternative asking different questions.