Meat and Mysticism

The Syndicate of Creatures Presents:
Meat and Mysticism

May 5–18, 2019

Opening Reception: Sunday, May 5, 1-4 pm

 

Organized by Signe Vad and Michelle Appelros

Exhibiting artists include Michelle Appelros (Sweden/Denmark), Ciriza (US), Fryd Frydendahl (Denmark/US), Marianne Jørgensen (Denmark), Elena Lundquist Ortíz (Denmark), Thinh Nguyen (US), and Signe Vad (Denmark)

Is it possible to provoke a tactile experience through art to shake the notion of detachment so often addressed in the western world? Can a personal bodily sensation become a critique on the patriarchal capitalistic society?

Meat and Mysticism is a collaborative exhibition with the artists of KRÆ syndikatet, Copenhagen, and Noysky Projects, Los Angeles, that mends the bonds or re-establishes the connections to the nature we are and live in.

This exhibition is born from an urge to rebel against the mantra “bigger, better, faster, stronger”, instead opting for tactile, quiet, strange and organic. The show consists of a broad variety of materials the artists work with video, photography, performance, latex, stone, teeth, bone, growths and blankets, sometimes working with meat/flesh and mysticism as tools.

The artworks can be tactile placentas as blankets or bone installations from ritual feasts. Artists in the show revive ancient human traditions to keep objects as symbols, giving them increased value by potent them with meaning through rituals. Artists work with meat and placentas to regrow a connection to our organic nature and put meaning in matter to enhance an earthly kinship.

The opening exhibition will feature a performance by Long Long, a reclaimed feminine superego from Thinh Nguyen’s childhood memories growing up as a girl, who will re-appropriate President Trump’s vulgar 2016 comment “grab ’em by the pussy” as a form of empowerment through the interpretation of dance.

As part of an effort to synthesize the natural with manmade, this exhibition is 75 percent biodegradable and compostable, using sustainable materials like soil, rocks, hair, latex, crystal dust, marble, paper, glass, and wood.

 

Installation Images

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Long Long performs “Grab Me By the Pussy” at the opening reception of Meat and Mysticism, Sunday, May 5, 2019.

 

 

 

About KRÆ syndikatet

We are KRÆ. We are creatures. We are a syndicate of established and young visual artists, writers, musicians, performance artists, art historians and philosophers.

While the capitalistic auto-cannibalism devours our nature, feasts on all living creatures and living growths; while we humans becomes a bottomless gap of insatiable needs, in a splintered world, where reflection hurts as the world is spinning in the wrong direction; we turn into disturbing creatures – we become KRÆ.

We gather around exhibitions, events, rituals and conversations. We work with events that revolves around inter-connectedness, either to nature, the world, the past, the future, and not least to each other. We want to create an experimental non-profit environment for rethinking, we start by dealing with the grotesque, the absurd, the rejected, the elements of nature, the robots and death. We use art and poetic collaboration as a gateway to disturb our fossilized mindsets and awaken numb senses.

 

About the artists

Signe Vad works with the weird, the erotic and the grotesque as a life-nerve, a poetic dialectic that criticizes alienated inhuman power systems and lifeless structures. She explores and examines existential, philosophical issues and through that address community, co-existence and political conditions. Her works often carry a comment on how we relate to- and create the world, and how we could exist in it together. Her art practice is multidisciplinary and includes photography, video art, installations, web stream art projects and performance. Vad lives and works in Copenhagen.

Michelle Appelros is an artist, performer, musician and food stylist. Always contemplating the mechanics of how humans operate, Appelros’ efforts to understand, relate, and accept are an underlying currents of her work. Working with a wide variety of materials like ritualistic bones, performance, and sound, she channels her anger with injustices in social, racial, sexual, anthropocene or political scenarios into her video and audio works. As a musician, Appelros sees music and sound as the most accurate means of communicating feelings and senses, which is of great importance in terms of relating to other beings.

Thinh Nguyen / Long Live Long Long is a cohesive multimedia project weaponized to dismantle the cis-normative gaze masquerades as mantra-songs, posters, vocal performance, and musical videos. Long Long is my reclaimed feminine superego from childhood memories growing up as a girl. She is my performance in power fighting for social justice. In these series of digital photography, I glamorously photographed Long Long as various deities drawn from different religious iconography in wearable biomorphic sculptures that I made out of refused dresses. In evocative and tantalizing poses, the imagery conflates the historical dissident relationship between religion and sexuality. The work proposes alternative ways to imagine queer non-binary identities as enlighten and spiritual beings as oppose to historical demonized narratives from western religions.

Fryd Frydendahl‘s practice is a continuous experiment of externalizing her internal images that are both deeply personal and general. She is avidly trying to find visual ways to be intimate and personal in her work without it drowning in sentimentalism. Frydendahl plans her pictures in details and outlines them before photographing, working primarily with analog photography that slows her down and makes her more involved in whatever subject she is working with. With this combination of rigid planning and an intuitive understanding of analog “coincidences”, she seeks to capture an underlying meaning in the immediate banal and the absurdity of everyday life.

Elena Lundquist Ortíz is a witch, researcher, and curator. She is initiator of hydra, a curatorial research project on watery worlding, transcorporeality and oceanic healing at the Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology. Her work and entire being is devoted to the contribution of alternative world-making in the face of planetary crisis. Guided by eco-feminism, she works with speculative magic and re-generative arts of living, alchemizing the material with the spiritual, the human with the earth.

Ciriza is a multidisciplinary artist who works in the realms of dreams, mythology, ancestry, animism, and alchemy. Her works are explorations of states of fluidity and transmutation; the slippery, elusive, and anomalistic spaces materialize in tactile and visceral forms. The result is otherworldly, a connection to the infinite where phantasmagoria becomes tangible, familiar, and feral. Ciriza’s instruments are performance, film and video, sculpture, installation, sound, and drawing. Her performances are a distillation of raw energy in ritualistic catharsis: a theater of the primordial, through which she uses the body to explore the fragile threshold between being and not being. Rooted in the medicinal, her sculptural works illuminate the possibilities of healing and metamorphoses within the opacity of shadow and murk.

Marianne Jørgensen studied at The Jutland Art Academy in 1981-85 and works with installations, sculpture, architecture, video and photography. Since 1997 she has worked outside the frame of the art institution and has consistently tried to push the boundaries of the sculpture media, often drawing inspiration from land art by using natural material such as plants, soil and grass. Jørgensen is preoccupied with the concrete and mundane confronted with current political affairs in the world’s focal points, but always from a conceptual approach.

 

More Information

On view: May 5-18, 2019
Opening Reception: Sunday, May 5, 2019, 1–4 pm
Exhibition hours: Thursday-Saturday, 12–6pm, and by appointment
Public transportation: Red Line Metro to Hollywood/Highland. Walk 2 blocks east.
Parking: 2 hour validated parking at Hollywood & Highland Center: 1768 N. Highland Ave ($2); 1520 N. McCadden Pl ($7); or street parking in vicinity ($2 per hour); limited free street parking on McCadden Place between Hollywood Boulevard and Yucca Street, as well as Yucca Street between Highland Avenue and Las Palmas Avenue.
Curators: Signe Vad and Michelle Appelros