KRISTIANSAND.- Sørlandets Kunstmuseum is presenting the installation Distance by the acclaimed Danish artist Jeppe Hein.
Jeppe Hein’s installations and sculptures play with our sensory experiences and invite the audience to take an active role. Public participation is also central to the installation Distance. When you enter the exhibition room, your presence is registered by a sensor and a ball is set in motion. The ball rolls at different speeds through several hundred meters of loops, lifts and spirals. You can follow your own personal ball through the labyrinth that transforms the exhibition space into a dynamic structure.
Distance was originally created in 2004, but for the exhibition at Sørlandets Kunstmuseum a unique version has been made. Each time the work is presented the result is contingent on the specific exhibition space. In this way, the work invites us to question how we as viewers experience our environment and architectural surroundings. Hein’s installations can be described as interventions, since they introduce new elements into art venues or public spaces that destabilize our normal viewing habits. The relationship of the individual to his surroundings and the psychological reaction to spatial changes stand at the center of his works.
Hein’s work makes reference to minimalism and its use of industrial materials. Also, the use of simple forms and repetition as strategies in the artistic production are present in his work. Hein’s installation is complex in expression, resembling a large roller coaster, but it’s built with simple repeating components. With Heins work our participation is crucial for a work’s completion. Hein in this way challenges our experience of what art is and can be. Dialogue, laughter and social interaction are some of the main ingredients in his productions, which exist at the intersection between art, architecture, design and technology.
Distance is on loan from ARoS Århus Kunstmuseum, and its instalment at Sørlandets Kunstmuseum has been accomplished through collaboration with ARoS, Jeppe Hein and his studio.
Jeppe Hein (b.1974) lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, graduating in 1997, and at Städelschule in Frankfurt (1997–99). He has held solo shows at Centre Pompidou in Paris, Tate Liverpool in England, PS1 in New York, the Barbican Centre in London and the Sculpture Centre in New York. In 2009, ARoS Århus Kunstmuseum organised Hein’s large solo exhibition Sense City, which resulted in the purchase of Distance for its own collection. Hein will also open a large soloshow “To Sense the World Inside Yourself”, at the Museum of Religious Art in Lemvig, Denmark on the 4th June 2017.
