Between Puppeteer and Prop: Kaari Upson’s Dollhouse—A Retrospective @ The Louisiana Musuem

Kaari Upson, Courtesy of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark

text by Kim Shveka

Kaari Upson, one of the most significant and versatile artists of her generation, was notable for her ability to merge various media, exchanging textures and techniques from one work to the next. Her boundary pushing complexity is one main motif of Dollhouse - A Retrospective at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the artist’s first career retrospective spanning the last two decades of her life.

Upson wove her own life in and out of her work, clawing at the walls of domesticity, memory, and identity, to re-inscribe herself between body and psyche, fact and fiction.

At the center of the exhibition is The Larry Project (2005-2012), her most discussed work. “Larry” was born when Upson passed an abandoned house in her hometown of San Bernadino, back in 2003. She formed a fictional character based on the abandoned belongings of her unknown neighbor, whom she named “Larry,” basing his appearance on Playboy mogul, Hugh Hefner.

Photo Kim Hansen/Courtesy of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark

Larry and his shadows are shown throughout the exhibition, encapsulating the entirety of Upson’s approach to her creation—blurring sentience and the conspicuous into a mirror of self, home, and American culture. Larry might be viewed as a catalyst, accessory, or supplement. He might also be seen as a prop, mirror, or vessel. Whatever he is, he is not the “center,” she said.

Her performance with a life-sized Larry doll, her manic drawings littered with scrawls and body fluids, her forensic adherence to his archive—none of it was really about him. He is not the center.  

The center, if there is one, is the house. Kaari Upson has stated that San Bernardino had become the landmark of her art making practice, always circling back to her origins in an attempt to untangle the knot of subject and memory, of desire and trauma. Upson understood viscerally that her core memories cannot be erased, so she found herself looking forward and backward in an attempt to recreate her own neighborhood, in the time and place of its situational trauma, and created her art from that place. In THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS OUTSIDE, first shown in Venice in 2019 and now reinstalled at Louisiana, overlapping models of domestic spaces are obscured from any coherent scale. We peer into corners, stumble through projections, eavesdrop on voices. The effect is both theatrical and intimate, claustrophobia disguised as play, a look inside Upson’s childhood, or perhaps her memories from it. The show’s title, Dollhouse, is an open metaphor: architecture as anatomy, art as a vessel to her soul. Here, the artist was once the puppet, but now she’s the puppeteer.

Photo Kim Hansen/Courtesy of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark

By the end of the exhibition, we meet Untitled (Foot Face), a series of 140 drawings repeating the same wide-eyed head and the same severed foot. Her mother’s. A symbol, a scar, the last image Upson left us before she died. Like everything else in her work, it’s both singular and serial, intimate and estranged. She traps us in the loop that she orbited from her early beginnings to her untimely passing.

In Dollhouse, Kaari Upson doesn’t offer resolution, only recursion. Her work doesn’t ask to be understood, it insists on being felt, like a bruise you can’t remember getting. She left behind no manifesto, just fragments, skins, splinters. And yet what emerges is a radical form of autobiography: not a story told from the outside, but one lived from the inside out.

 

Kaari Upson, Untitled, 2007
Courtesy of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark

 

Dollhouse - A Retrospective, is on view through October 26th at The Louisiana Museum, Gl Strandvej 13, 3050 Humlebæk, Denmark

Liu Shiyuan Presents For Jord @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery In Los Angeles

For Jord, Liu Shiyuan’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, is comprised of photography, video and drawings, that revolve around a fictional character named Jord. In Danish, the word jord translates to ‘earth’ or ‘dirt’, and as a name, it means ‘divine being’ or ‘peace’. In Liu’s work, this character is not human, not from the past or the future, and has no race or gender. They are the amorphous, symbolic protagonist who binds the work across ideological and formal narratives.

In her photography practice, Liu uses personal iPhone videos and Google image searches as primary sources for her work. By searching words and phrases online, Liu identifies images with multiple meanings that can be attributed to the same word, offering a diversity of perspectives and interpretations. At her studio in Copenhagen, Liu searched the word “Jord” on Google images, resulting in images of dirt. Interestingly, many of the thumbnails featured two hands holding soil - giving the dirt a border, a containment and a sense of belonging. As a country, a culture, or any community with boundaries, the character Jord represents our connected and shared nature. For Liu Shiyuan, a Chinese national living in Denmark, this common ground of all humans is an important aspect of our livelihood.

Liu’s new film, For the Photos I Didn’t Take, For the Stories I Didn’t Read, is inspired by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen’s book The Little Match Seller. The story portrays a penniless young girl on New Year’s Eve trying to sell matches to make money for her family. From the cold and snowy street, she peers into other homes, imagining a better life. As she fantasizes, she peacefully passed away in the dawn of the new year, an abrupt and tragic end to the tale. In 1920, The Little Match Seller was translated to Chinese and included in educational books throughout the country. The story was used by the Chinese government during the Cultural Revolution as a way of explaining how the communist party was saving China from the problems of Western capitalism.

Liu reintroduces the audience to The Little Match Seller with a stream of images the artist found online by individually searching every word in the entire text. By recontextualizing the narrative, the viewer simultaneously reads both stories: the written version from 1845 and a parallel story created by today’s imagery. Every time the word “SHE” or “HER” appears in the text, Liu uses portraits of young girls from around the world - girls from poor families and wealthy families, from refugee camps and of different ethnicities. The result is surprisingly complex and unified. From one perspective it is clear to see the shadow of post-war society; from another, there is no change at all.

Set softly behind the rolling text and images, otherworldly environments create an atmosphere of the unknown, as if the viewer is looking onto earth from another universe. The idea of being a foreigner, an outsider or an alien is a frequent theme in Liu’s practice. Having lived in many different countries: growing up in China, studying in the United States and now living in Denmark — the same country as Hans Christian Andersen — Liu has a unique perspective on the cultural and political differences in these countries. For the Photos I Didn’t Take, For the Stories I Didn’t Read contemplates and questions larger issues of communism, socialism, capitalism and the affects on the individual — especially during the holiday season when indulgence and extravagance are celebrated, disparity and inequality become more pronounced. By bringing up these questions, Liu leaves the viewer to observe our differences, consider alternative perspectives and most importantly, understand our shared connection as humans.

For Jord is on view through January 30 @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery 1010 N Highland Ave Los Angeles, CA 90038.

Two Boxers And Two Roller Skater Girls Face Off In Jacob Bellens' New Music Video For the Track "Polyester Skin"

Polyester Skin is the title track and first single from Danish musician Jacob Bellens' upcoming hfn album, and introduces his abundant talent in fine style. Born in 1979 in Nakskov, a small town in Southern Denmark, Bellens has written songs since the age of 13 resulting in a huge output of material. Danish photographer and video artist Jonas Bang created a wonderful, weird and charming video for ‘Polyester Skin’ featuring two boxers and two roller skater girls who face off in a strange balletic dance set to the tempo of the track. You can purchase the single here. 

Aarhus Is On Fire: Read Our Interview With An Amazing New Band From Denmark Called Liss →

Put a ‘B’ in front of Danish band Liss’ name and you have the perfect description of their unique, blissed out sound. Comprised of four teenagers from Aarhus (which is a little bit like the New Orleans of Denmark), Liss sounds like an amalgam of Arthur Russell angst and 90s R&B. Currently, Liss – who are on the Escho label (known for introducing Iceage and KLoAK to the world) – is making waves on the international music scene, and it is only a matter of time before they blow up in the States. In the following interview, Søren Holm, Vilhelm Strange, Villads Tyrrestrup, and Tobias Hansen chat with Autre about musical upbringing, their unique sound and their new single, which will be released at the end of this month. Also, listen to their incredible track, Always, at the end of the interview. Click here to read and listen. 

Lover

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This band is going to be enormous. The Echo Vamper is a duo formed by real life couple Iza Mortag Freund, from Denmark, and James Brook, from England, who just released their first EP in October, entitled It's The Echo Vamper, and are already making enormous waves with their unbelievably explosive sound. Above is a video for their track Lover, a single off their current EP. See music video after the jump.