Street Haunting
May 2 - 24, 2014
Nanna Debois Buhl
Opening: May 2, 17:00 - 22:00
Interview by Maria Bordorff:
På kanten af fiktion og virkelighed
Download: Maps of Paris,
Brooklyn, Münster and København
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The exhibition Street Haunting by Nanna Debois Buhl features a series of works that all utilize the act of walking in unexpected ways. For each work, Buhl has created a system where a walk becomes a catalyst for images and stories, revealing new paths through urban and literary landscapes.
In Buhl’s work Collected Walks, a hybrid fictional character travels across time and space. The installation combines a soundtrack composed of literary fragments about women walking through different cities with a series of cyanotype prints made by Buhl on her daily walks in various locations. The print series Street Haunting revolves around photographs of a young woman found by Buhl on a walk. These photographs are presented along with divergent readings from five psychics who speculate on the young woman’s life and persona based on a set of questions used for character development in scriptwriting. For the slide installation Night Map, Buhl has transferred the Parisian route of two lovers from Michèle Bernstein’s 1961 novel La Nuit (modeled on the 18th century novel Les Liaisons dangereuses) to the area surrounding New Shelter Plan (Vesterbro, Carlsberg og Valby). Starting from the very location of the exhibition, Buhl has created a new setting for the story through the détournement of texts and maps. This new chapter is shown alongside two previous chapters based on nightwalks in Brooklyn, New York and Münster, Germany.
By exploring the role of the Flâneuse, Buhl connects different literary periods and fields of writing in singular ways. Voices from the politically-charged 19th century works of George Sand fuse with Virginia Woolf’s reflections on the imaginary possibilities of walking and with fragments from contemporary pop culture (Sex and the City). The exhibition unravels new routes through the city as well as through literature, addressing the walk as a way to experiment with identity and to carve out a space for reflection. For Buhl, walking is at once a physical act (done of necessity or otherwise), a mode of production, and a metaphor.
Nanna Debois Buhl received her MFA from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2006 and participated in The Whitney Independent Study Program, New York in 2008-09. Recent shows include: Pérez Art Museum, Miami, El Museo del Barrio, NY; Art in General, NY; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Bureau, NY; Lunds Konsthall, Sweden; Museum for Contemporaty Art, Roskilde; and Kunsthallen Brandts, Odense, Denmark. Her work is in the collections of the Museum for Contemporary Art and The National Museum of Photography in Denmark. She has been artist-in-residence at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), New York. Revolver Publishing has published her artists’ books Atlas of Anatomy (2013), A Journey in Two Directions (2010), and City Grammar (with Liz Linden, 2010). Her work has recently been discussed in Art in America, Flash Art, Artforum, and The New York Times.
The exhibition is supported by The Danish Arts Foundation and Copenhagen Art Council
