Eli Maria Lundgaard - A Home for Occupants

Eli Maria Lundgaard: A Home for Occupants Opening: Friday, April 24, 6pm April 25–June 28, 2020

Throughout the last years, Eli Maria Lundgaard has developed an eerie cinematic language, using simple, almost insignificant close-ups of Scandinavian nature and other settings combined with performing hands and a punctuated narration voiced in a soft alto. Pivoting eco- and ethnographic motives of viscera and invasive species, animism and amoebae, Lundgaard’s idiomatically written lines lap at the porous outlines of dominant linguistic and visual language. For UKS, the artist will populate the entire venue with around 500 tiny ceramic pieces crawling across the gallery spaces. Half of them glazed, half matte-black, the aesthetics of the tiny clods is homespun, carrying the rough imprint of the artist’s fingers, as if constructing its own odd alphabet or system of corporeal codes. Alongside these, a new video will loop. Cued by the body and its imminent state of transformation and decay, the video assembles text and image. Slippery, saturated sentences—pondering resident species such as human microbiota, germs and parasites, circles of decline-and-growth—meet footage including a snake slowly devouring a mouse, and hands, palms painted blue, taking fern leaves apart, piece by piece.

Lundgaard’s recent exhibitions include the Future Generation Art Prize exhibition in Kiev and in Venice; the Moscow International Biennale for Young Art; and the Antarctic Biennale.

UKS’ Director and Curator: Rhea Dall.