Every Line Ever Spoken

Takeshi Shiomitsu and Sandra Vaka Olsen

Opening: 9 May, 17.00
10-11 May, festival, see Artist Run
Exhibition on show until 31 May

A duo exhibition showing work by Takeshi Shiomitsu and Sandra Vaka Olsen – produced in collaboration with Arcadia Missa (London) as part of Artist Run Festival

This exhibition is about whiteness, purity and neutrality in the surfaces of contemporary aesthetics. For Shiomitsu and Olsen, these specific surfaces are too the layer in which labour, ideology or process are sedimented as material, through which a representational regime can assert itself. For Every Line Ever Spoken both artists have produced a new body of work in which the surface performs various physical embodiments of this relation.

Individually Every Line Ever Spoken expands each artists’ examination of how – as a site of display and production – digital surfaces presume a neutrality or absence of bodily activity. Sunshield continues Olsen’s collapsing of digital display into the techniques and manipulation in analogue photography. Gels and liquids sitting directly on screens that magnify and distort their pixels are photographed and re-photographed. Sunscreen is used as paint by Olsen—applied by hand—in anticipation of exposure leaves a physical impression on the photograph to create an image literally blocked out by negative space. Shiomitsu’s paintings, light-box sculptures and video work – collectively forming Pale History – are organised, as a diagram of artistic and technical labour as display structures. These components, singular works in themselves, layer together subjective and textual responses to whiteness and neutrality which are at the same time complicated and replicated by the intrinsic material qualities of each work, and the canon of painting.

This conception of neutrality, explored in this exhibition, on the one hand for Shiomitsu, follows whiteness as a ground for representation; sanctioning the beautiful, what is visible; and who or what is conversely only allowed to labour for the foundations. On the other hand, as with process undertaken by Olsen, neutrality is too the folding of that excluded body and material onto a surface so concerned with so-called immateriality and yet so touched as the screen of the contemporary digital device.

whiteness is the implication of
blankness or space
on a wall, body, screen

Curated by Tom Clark, Rózsa Farkas, and Iben Bach Elmstrøm

Every Line Ever Spoken – interview with the artists in Kopenhagen (in English): PDF