Meat and Mysticism

Signe Vad works with the weird, the erotic and the grotesque as a life-nerve, a poetic dialectic that criticizes alienated inhuman power systems and lifeless structures. She explores and examines existential, philosophical issues and through that address community, co-existence and political conditions. Her works often carry a comment on how we relate to- and create the world, and how we could exist in it together. Her art practice is multidisciplinary and includes photography, video art, installations, web stream art projects and performance. Vad lives and works in Copenhagen.

Michelle Appelros is an artist, performer, musician and food stylist. Always contemplating the mechanics of how humans operate, Appelros’ efforts to understand, relate, and accept are an underlying currents of her work. Working with a wide variety of materials like ritualistic bones, performance, and sound, she channels her anger with injustices in social, racial, sexual, anthropocene or political scenarios into her video and audio works. As a musician, Appelros sees music and sound as the most accurate means of communicating feelings and senses, which is of great importance in terms of relating to other beings.

Thinh Nguyen / Long Live Long Long is a cohesive multimedia project weaponized to dismantle the cis-normative gaze masquerades as mantra-songs, posters, vocal performance, and musical videos. Long Long is my reclaimed feminine superego from childhood memories growing up as a girl. She is my performance in power fighting for social justice. In these series of digital photography, I glamorously photographed Long Long as various deities drawn from different religious iconography in wearable biomorphic sculptures that I made out of refused dresses. In evocative and tantalizing poses, the imagery conflates the historical dissident relationship between religion and sexuality. The work proposes alternative ways to imagine queer non-binary identities as enlighten and spiritual beings as oppose to historical demonized narratives from western religions.

Fryd Frydendahl‘s practice is a continuous experiment of externalizing her internal images that are both deeply personal and general. She is avidly trying to find visual ways to be intimate and personal in her work without it drowning in sentimentalism. Frydendahl plans her pictures in details and outlines them before photographing, working primarily with analog photography that slows her down and makes her more involved in whatever subject she is working with. With this combination of rigid planning and an intuitive understanding of analog “coincidences”, she seeks to capture an underlying meaning in the immediate banal and the absurdity of everyday life.

Elena Lundquist Ortíz is a witch, researcher, and curator. She is initiator of hydra, a curatorial research project on watery worlding, transcorporeality and oceanic healing at the Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology. Her work and entire being is devoted to the contribution of alternative world-making in the face of planetary crisis. Guided by eco-feminism, she works with speculative magic and re-generative arts of living, alchemizing the material with the spiritual, the human with the earth.

Ciriza is a multidisciplinary artist who works in the realms of dreams, mythology, ancestry, animism, and alchemy. Her works are explorations of states of fluidity and transmutation; the slippery, elusive, and anomalistic spaces materialize in tactile and visceral forms. The result is otherworldly, a connection to the infinite where phantasmagoria becomes tangible, familiar, and feral. Ciriza’s instruments are performance, film and video, sculpture, installation, sound, and drawing. Her performances are a distillation of raw energy in ritualistic catharsis: a theater of the primordial, through which she uses the body to explore the fragile threshold between being and not being. Rooted in the medicinal, her sculptural works illuminate the possibilities of healing and metamorphoses within the opacity of shadow and murk.

Marianne Jørgensen studied at The Jutland Art Academy in 1981-85 and works with installations, sculpture, architecture, video and photography. Since 1997 she has worked outside the frame of the art institution and has consistently tried to push the boundaries of the sculpture media, often drawing inspiration from land art by using natural material such as plants, soil and grass. Jørgensen is preoccupied with the concrete and mundane confronted with current political affairs in the world’s focal points, but always from a conceptual approach.