Installation pics from the show: Business As Usual. A collaboration between danish and vietnamese artists.
Interview about the project:
Jes Brinch: Theis, can you explain your installation that used the water tank under the ground floor, and how you worked with the relation between public and private space in that piece?
Theis Wendt: I have done works before about the degradation of the public sphere in connection with the growing privatisation. One subject that interests me about public space is the limits of behavioural patterns and movement among people. I thought it would be interesting to work with the same theme in Hanoi that I have worked with in Copenhagen. I was of course confronted with a lot of new problems and issues. If we look at traffic, for example, the normal behaviour in Denmark is to follow the traffic laws whereas in Vietnam it is normal to break them, which creates an autonomous way of navigating through the streets. That makes traffic into a self-organizing organism, which I find very interesting and at the same time intimidating.
The installation is a play with space, function and expectation. It combines materials we know from the public as well as the private sphere - a construction site and a living room rug. The piece is site-specific and uses both the given exhibition space and the water tank under the floor. The warning lights create a serious atmosphere in the room, but when you look closer nothing is wrong and nothing is happening, the worker is just standing there – hanging out in the water, gazing into the darkness. I like the idea of a worker, not working and escaped from duty, but still in uniform, therefore related to some kind of function, or seen from the viewer’s eyes an expectation of function. The work doesn’t tell anything about what needs repairing or what he is doing, it actually just shows unlogical behaviour, in a situation normally related to logical thinking.
Jes Brinch: A striking thing about the bamboo shop, the collectively produced framework, was that it was made in a way as to deny art as being art as craftsmanship, consciously building the installation in a bad way, combining wrong materials such as sticky tape and bamboo. Can you explain a little about this, and why it was made that way?
Theis Wendt: The whole idea of constructing another space in the gallery was an attempt to define a “neutral” space together, where we could meet each other on “equal” ground. Being an artist from a Western society you always have the knowledge and history of the “white cube” in mind. Therefore you act upon that, consciously or unconnsciously, when exhibiting in a gallery. In Vietnam, that frame of reference is not normal and since the main goal of this project was to exchange cultural and artistic experiences and work collectively, that part of history wasn’t really important. We thought that changing the exhibition space together would make good sense.
A crucial thing about the shop was its function as a frame to present individual art works, which I think was important in this project, because it was a way of presenting works to each other, which demanded a more difficult reading. For me the slower reading creates curiosity, which I think has a great potential, when we are talking about any kind of meeting between two groups of very different people.
The construction was built the way it was because the function of the shop wasn’t about selling products, but another way of presenting artworks to reflect upon. The combination of materials was a way to define the construction as ours.
Jes Brinch: How did you experience the actual collaboration with the Vietnamese artists?
Theis Wendt: We had some translating delays back and forth and like I was talking about before concerning not having the same frame of reference, we had some communication problems. We used a lot of time having meetings, trying to understand each other. It was a good, but hard experience being forced to explain every little detail about what you wanted to work with and why.
