ART-PRESENTATION: Thomas Hirschhorn-Community of Fragments
Thomas Hirschhorn uses everyday and found materials such as plastic sheeting, cardboard, aluminium, packing tape and magazine images to create a dystopian reality. The process of making remains visible and becomes a metaphor for the individual and collective struggle to establish democracy. Implicated in Hirschhorn’s work, viewers are obliged to consume and reflect upon that which they may have hitherto been able to ignore in their daily lives.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: GL STRAND Archive
Thomas Hirschhorn creates an artistic space within GL STRAND and invites the public to occupy it. The exhibition entitled “Community of Fragments” is created as a site-specific free access project on two floors and transforms the whole architecture of the museum. Right from the main stairway that leads up through the gallery spaces, Hirschhorn let the fake cave or abandoned mine take over from floor to ceiling. All visitors are invited to participate in the reconstruction in a workshop located at the center of the exhibition. They are able to create sculptures and two-dimensional works that contribute to the exhibition; but one can also use the workshop for dialogue and debate. The admission to the exhibition is free. Thomas Hirschhorn’s exhibition “Community of Fragments” turned GL STRAND into an anti-architectural space. The exhibition has been created as a site-specific free access project on two floors, and has transformed the whole architecture of the museum. Right from the main stairway that leads up through the gallery, Hirschhorn will let the fake cave or abandoned mine take over from floor to ceiling, so we are literally moving around on the premises of a destruction. In the exhibition the artist pays tribute to Antonio Gramsci and Simone Weil’s works for their fragmented nature, because both of them, due to life circumstances, never published an assembled book. Both of them left us “beautiful notebooks, which in their fragmented writing, are tools to reconstruct the world”. For a number of years Thomas Hirschhorn has worked with the ruin motif as a specific physical space, and he explores the concepts of destruction that are associated with it. The ruin involves not only destruction, but optimism and hope. The ruin means an opportunity to start over and build up anew. “Community of Fragments” seems like a classic Hirschhorn space, a maze and nest of fully built-out environments in materials anyone can get anywhere. It contains the noise of absurdism and surrealism, with sofas wrapped in packing tape, the homespun construction of children’s play or a no-budget monster movie, and the frenzy of the automatic. It is chaotic, crammed, and thrown-together. Inside the exhibition Hirschhorn builds laboratories and workshops for cooperative negotiation. Space is cleared among the taped-cardboard stones between the straining faux beams, and a meeting-room table is erected, complete with an oversized notepad for brainstorming sessions. A long table on many trestles, surrounded by chiseled flakes, is for sculpture. There’s even a quaint breakout area, with sofas. Literature everywhere, lots of philosophy. Hirschhorn is a student of the radical thinkers of history, and — as with many of his exhibitions, a spray-painted slogan forms an unofficial mantra for the display. “We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise” he writes, quoting the French philosopher-activist Simone Weil. A manned workshop functions as a workshop for dialogue and artistic production where the visitors can build on the basis of the materials of which the ruin consists. Here one can among other things create sculptures and two-dimensional works that contribute to the exhibition; but one can also use the workshop for dialogue and debate. With the exhibition Thomas Hirschhorn creates an artistic space that we are invited to occupy – again and again if you like. For the same reason, admission to the exhibition is free.
Photo: Thomas Hirschhorn, preparatory sketch for “Community of Fragments”, 2020, © Thomas Hirschhorn, Courtesy the artist and Kunstforeningen GL STRAND
Info: Kunstforeningen GL STRAND, Gl. Strand 48, Copenhagen, Denmark, Duration: 21/4-6/6/2021, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Fri 11:00-18:00, Wed 11:00-20:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-17:00, https://en.glstrand.dk
