Location: Glentevej 49

FOS
WORDS FOR WORKS
15.03.24 – 11.05.24
GLENTEVEJ 49 · COPENHAGEN

NILS STÆRK is pleased to present FOS' solo exhibition: Words for Works. Please find a link to the portfolio here.

If any sentence echoes through this corridor, it is as domestic as broken and unfamiliar. Layers of textiles set the scene for the repetition of a supple beat. Words. For. Works. Or was it works, for words? It is hard to hear. When I think of words, I see strings of letters unravelling. Or shells wrapped around things, like labels to an array of familiar things - a chair, a table, a window, a mirror.

Sequences of letters unfold in front of me towards the end of the luminous abstraction of this page, feeding the arrow of time running with the cursor. Left to right, with any yet-to-be-formulated idea, always ahead. For other ways of thinking and being in the world, the inscrutable future lives behind us. In that vision, unknown thoughts start from the back, expanding through my body towards the fingers that push the cursor forward, one type at a time.

It is a vaguely known feeling. Going about daily chores, I sometimes sense my mother so existentially close to me that her imaginary body takes over mine, entering from behind like a surgeon into a back-opened scrub. Our arms and hands merge into gestures of domesticity. It is then that I understand, most profoundly, how we are inescapably bound to each other, coiled into this creepy yet loving hybrid creature.

Is the present a factory of the past? Or a collision of timelines crumbles the past's foundations of the present? Strings of words pierce through forms and materials, shedding logic and bringing linear time on for the ride. How are they transformed when they emerge on the other side? Or how do they remain in that in-between, gluey and surprised into a time-suspended new thing, like the spooky creature created by my mother's ghostly penetration?

Hierarchies dissolve as language and time erase each other's order. Between skins, words swell, deform, and find a brief standstill in their new being. Membranes, both physical and metaphorical, lay bare, losing their defined shapes. If we expand that moment, we might get a sculpture. Coils and curves intertwine between opposing forces, creating an entanglement that defies linearity. Energy, whether derived from solar power or heat, is their driving force. Reminiscent of an archaeological dig into the layers of language, is touch the historian of this domestic space, now collapsed and lonely? Perhaps there should be no more words here. Just the sheer gravity of works for works.

Text by F.A.