Collection Mabuse
Overgaden, Copenhagen, Denmark
For ‘Collection Mabuse’ the artists known as rasmus knud (an unlikely combination of two Danish first names) from the mid 1990s to 2005 – Johannes Christoffersen and Sebastian Schiørring – teamed up with their former partner in art Søren Andreasen to stage a collective show of new works within the metaphorical framework of the fictional villain, Dr. Mabuse. Part of Overgaden’s ongoing interest in staging ‘updates’ by a generation of Danish artists who emerged on the international scene in the 1990s, the show continued the trio’s critical investigations of the objects, structures and processes of the social field in the twilight zone between the given and the possible. As the title’s reference to the infamous master of disguise reveals, the continuation also involved a development towards an aesthetic of ambiguous appearances.
The show demonstrated the three artists’ different stylistic and material approaches. Rather than dividing the exhibition space into separate sections, they presented their works as an integrated conceptual whole or a single collection. Hence, the front space brought together works by each artist: Schiørring’s Overtoning til sort (Fade to Black, 2011) was a sculpturally elaborated film projector, built around one of the museum’s pillars, showing imagery of a foggy panorama of Copenhagen filmed from Overgaden’s roof. Andreasen’s In the World of Appearances 1–5 (2011), a series of small engravings based on simple horizontal lines of varying length and density, was juxtaposed with Christoffersen’s three-part work Autopsy of a Ra-fly (2011). The latter brings together two older works with a newer one, all created around the central theme of Charma (First flying Ra-fly, 1982, Kama [The Sun of Cheap Appearances], 1995, and Coma [Prototype for Tomorrow, 2001], 2011). The final work consists of three empty plinths inviting the audience to visualize models of the famous Italian RA-fighter in various stages of its development.
The show came off as a Postmodern cabinet of curiosities: it combined a Surrealist sensibility for the aura of the unfamiliar object, a Minimalist sense of structural logic oscillating between order and nonsense, cool Conceptualist documentation of ‘the real’, and the expanded reality of literary fiction (particularly in the artists’ texts printed in a folder that accompanied the show). Each of the works contributed to a multifaceted, open-ended narrative that unfolded through suggestion, inversion and abstraction. The narrative circled around the state of the contemporary world in negotiation with its Modernist history of now somewhat anachronistic, failed and obscure – but nonetheless explorable – ideals.
Unlike the traditional cabinet of curiosities, the show’s scope was not encyclopaedic and its mode of address was not educational – far from it. It constituted an idiosyncratic vision that challenged the audience to reflectively navigate subtly strange territory. As a counterpoint to current celebrations of transparency and the frictionless in art and capitalism, the show insisted on the indeterminate as a means to (successfully) disrupt our automatic visual and intellectual responses through activating our curiosity; not only in the sense of simple wonder but as an imaginary practice involving a mode of critical perception and thinking that does not take the world of appearances that Mabuse embodies for granted, but rather one that speculates about the probability of its very existence.
Jacob Lillemose
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