PHENOMENON
Commission for Banedanmark’s administrative building, Ringsted DK, 2020
Pigmented resin and Railway shards
2 x 300x60x60cm
Banedanmark is a Danish company responsible for maintenance and traffic control on all of the state owned Danish railway network.
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NEGATIVE MEADOW
Solo show at Kunsthal Nord, 2019
https://artviewer.org/theis-wendt-at-kunsthal-nord/
https://tzvetnik.online/article/theis-wendt-at-kunsthal-nord
Text by Kunsthal Nord
The virtual world is an essential theme in the exhibition Negative Meadow, which encourages the viewer to explore and sense the intertwinement of the virtual and the present reality. The accelerated evolution of contemporary technologies has affected our perception of time and space, because they are constantly changing our relationship with the immediate reality, and the representation of that reality, on virtual platforms.
The Danish visual artist, Theis Wendt, has worked with installation and sculpture in the specific architectural context of Kunsthal NORD. He uses todays digital flow of images in interaction with the analogue image, to create abstract, spatial installations and sculptures, through which he explores the image as space, surface, reflection and communication.
Negative Meadow is inspired by Kunsthal NORD, situated in the building of a former coal power plant, as ‘the factory’, a representative symbol of how the work force, virtuality, climate change, nature and humans have been fused together in a virtual, omnipresent factory that never closes.
Theis Wendt has been on multiple research visits in order to study Kunsthal NORD and the surrounding city of Aalborg, to ensure a strong connection between the installation and the aesthetic and sensory experience of the building. The architecture of the old coal factory is raw and unpolished. However, through virtual interventions the actual space is expanded and twisted into an alternative reality. The installation hereby portrays a reinterpretation of inner and outer space, an intermediate space where time has momentarily stopped.
The exhibition Negative Meadow may seem dark and dystopian, but there is light in the synthetic darkness. Theis Wendt attempts to place the viewer in an encounter with the world, where seeds of doubt are sown of the world’s material reality.
INVISIBLE PRESENCE
Group show 'What is Left Behind' at Akershus kunstsenter, 2017
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Participating artists: Robin Danielsson / Silas Inoue / Sarah Vajira Lindström / Oliver Kunkel / Theis Wendt
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https://artviewer.org/what-is-left-behind-at-akershus-kunstsenter/
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Curated and text by Monica Holmen
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The aspects and theories on cause and effect have been much discussed by philosophers such as Aristotle and David Hume. There is a logical and irrevocably connection between cause and effect, action and consequence.
In many guises these are some of the underlying notions in the exhibition What is Left Behind, wherein the five artists base their projects on topics spanning from nature catastrophes and ecological conditions, to contemplation and research on process and formal questions in the studio. Nuclear test bombings, invasive and extinct species, food and flesh, artistic processes and exploration may serve as key words. Consequences of actions – spanning from the seemingly insignificant to rather tumultuous and disruptive outcomes – are visualized in installation, photography, textile, video and sculpture.
Throughout the exhibition we see how these topics resonnate in visual art, but also the outcomes of artistic actions as such. What traces does an artist leave behind in a piece? To what extent is left-overs from the process visible in the finished piece? And how might both local and global conditions echo in a piece of art?
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With the two-channel video installation Invisible Presence consisting of Trinitite stones, Theis Wendt poses questions about human’s relationship to nature, and the much-debated geological age of anthropocen who many now believe we have entered.
SYNTHETIC REVERIES
Projektrum D7, Copenhagen DK, 2017
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https://artviewer.org/theis-wendt-at-d7/
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Text by Rolf Nowotny
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This is the tumbling tundra.
A figure tumbling through that tundra,
loose teeth and fell-off shoes in its wake.
That tumbling figure appears to be me.
My body tumbling through that tumbling tundra.
My moss-suit cushions the blows, but my body – purple – green - will be bruished by morning. A dandelion signal stirrs in my nostril EVADE! EVADE! and I slide horisontally through the soggy soil of the hillside and into the oldcold permafrost. Cables snap from my arms and spine and I feel my bloodsugar drop instantly. Stuck between sediments, suspended in time and I have broken an antlar. My signal will most surely be delayed.
I regain consciousness by dawn!
The luxury of a name was never given to me. Where I come from we eat what is living. My sense of language is very rudimentary. We mainly communicate through whistles, taps and clicks. In fact, I do not understand what you say. I stuff my mouth with lichen hoping my signal will improve. Above me eaglecopters circle in a mid-air mating dance. Buzz buzz buzz. I shoot one down and throw it on the fire. Pop pop pop.
Shadows stretch thinly across low growing shrubs commanding me to sleep and I wedge my body between stones and cover it with dirt and moss. I switch my Necrovalve to /Uu. Breathing sky. Goodnight Malevolent Mother. I go into a starless sleep and move on to new flamescapes.
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