ART CITIES:Stockholm-Lea Porsager
Lea Porsager graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, and the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main in 2010. She began her studies as a PhD fellow at Malmö Art Academy and Lund University in September 2015. Porsager’s practice interweaves fabulation and speculation with a variety of mediums including film, sculpture, photography, and text.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Moderna Museet Archive
The exhibition “STRIPPED” features new works, where human meets non-human in an exploration of science, mysticism and feminism. In this first major museum presentation of Lea Porsager at Moderna Museet, visitors encounter an artistic practice that explores the boundaries between the physical and the metaphysical, making Porsager one of the most talked about Nordic contemporary artists today. Lea Porsager’s artistic practice is consistently characterised by her fascination for spirituality and physics, especially quantum physics. She approaches these fields from a feminist and queer perspective. The works are speculative and imaginative, at once both material and immaterial. The art is engendered in a spirit of gravity mixed with irony, where the grave aspect consists of penetrating as deeply as possible into the material, while irony is a disruptive force that occasionally borders on vulgarity. “It is there – in that elastic interval – that I discern a potential to go beyond representations and dogma, to open new spaces,” says Lea Porsager. “I am attracted to science, mysticism and feminism because all three subjects are open, wild and raw, albeit in very different ways. They can challenge each other where they intersect and separate. This gives rise to a vibration, movement or collision that I am interested in exploring”. With an oeuvre spanning both physical and metaphysical themes, Lea Porsager uses a wide array of artistic practices: she devotes her practice equally to sculpture, filmmaking, writing and research. The exhibition consists entirely of new works, including magnetic prayer wheels, icon paintings and 3D animations. The largest element in the exhibition is three wings from a wind turbine that have been cut into slices. Like a fallen giant on the museum floor, this processed readymade will be matched with an almost twenty-metre long cushion – a beanbag shaped like a fourth turbine wing – offering visitors a place to sit down in the middle of the sculptural work.
Photo: Lea Porsager, FULL OF BEANS, 2020, Photo: Malle Madsen, © Lea Porsager, Courtesy the artist and Moderna Museet
Info: Curator: Lars Bang Larsen, Moderna Museet, Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Duration: 21/11/2020-14/2/2021, www.modernamuseet.se
