Divine Desires Event

Marie Munk and Stine Deja
opening reception:
Friday September 9th, 12-20h

When we speak of ‘enlightenment’ it is with a dead metaphor. To have an insight is both to see and to know, and in order to see, there must be light. The enlightenment was the era in which Europeans became obsessed with facts and with what can be seen; a time characterised by technological and scientific progression – progression: another dead metaphor – which, in many ways, we’ve yet to recover from. New lampposts lit up the cities and the people went dancing in the streets. Light after dark was a secular miracle; a victory over nature. But amidst this euphoric newness our relation to the things that will not so easily be brought to light withered. The world became a face with eyes wide open, unable to fall asleep, unable to dream because the lights are always on.

At ALBA, Stine Deja and Marie Munk have installed an enormous person. Perhaps a kind of deity, an omniscient Big Brother, or an enlarged reflection of ourselves. The head is reminiscent of the great statues of Buddhism, and the hands that stir restlessly in the windows of God and Adam in Michelangelo’s famous fresco in the Sistine Chapel. The soundtrack emphasises the solemn, spiritual, almost melancholy atmosphere, while the blinding clinical clarity that dominates the space recalls both God as we meet him in a Hollywood movie, and life as conjured under a microscope in a laboratory. In this figure, then, we meet another dead metaphor that refers both to the divine and its absence.

The exhibition’s title, Divine Desires, further exacerbates this contradiction. For where the divine can be understood as something static and calm-inducing, desire is the opposite. The hand pulls at the window like the insomniac scrolls the night away in the glow of their smartphone, and as if the passers-by outside were part of the endless newsfeed. What insight is this person after? And when will it be enough? Here, it seems the object itself has been replaced by a void, or that the desire referred to in the title is simply desire for its own sake.

With the development of perspective in the renaissance came the idea of the painting as a window; an opening towards a fictional world, separate from our own. Where the flat, gothic pictures of the past had been presentations – direct, almost carnal – this technical progression instead produced re-presentations. And in that shift, art became full of the stuff of desire: absence, distance. As one of the great thinkers of the time, Filarete, put it, the new spacious painting can be understood as false, because it shows us ‘something which is not’ – una cosa che non e’.
- Kristian Vistrup Madsen