Jesper Just, This is a Landscape of Desire, 2013
09.02.13 - 21.04.13
HEART was the first art museum to feature the Jesper Just in a solo show in 2005 and has since made acquisitions of his work a priority in its collection. Because of its long involvement and continued fascination with the artist, HEART is now organising a second solo show of the artist as a survey, highlighting the most significant pieces from the past 10 years of Just's career. A career, which has enjoyed such international success and prominence that Jesper Just has been chosen to represent Denmark at the Venice Biennial in 2013.
The exhibition will also be the inauguration of a new and unique piece by Just, specially commissioned by HEART and generously funded by The New Carlsberg Foundation. The piece, entitled This is a Landscape of Desire, will form the core of the exhibition, which also features eight other works realised by the artist in the past 10 years.
Three of them (This Nameless Spectacle, 2011; Sirens of Chrome, 2010 and A Voyage in Dwelling, the eponymous episode of the 2008 trilogy) will be presented as monumental video installations in the main exhibition space of the museum, together with This is a Landscape of Desire. This will enable "a spatial experience", where a powerful correlation between the emotional movement of Jesper Just's characters and that of the viewers is established.
A psychogeography is traced by the artist's imagination via the languages of visual arts, cinema and architecture. Over the years, Just's work has scaled up: today his video installations have a sculptural presence that not only engages the viewers on a visual, but also on a psychological level, while it also tends to incorporate them physically, as will be evident in the exhibition.
Earlier single-channel works like It Will All End in Tears, 2006; Something to Love, 2005, Bliss and Heaven, 2004, The Lonely Villa, 2004, No Man is an Island II (an episode of the trilogy A Fine Romance, 2004) will be continuously screened in HEART concert hall, so that the audience can get a full perspective on Just's body of work.
Jesper Just, This Nameless Spectacle, 2011
Jesper Just's films started out more or less as recorded happenings, seemingly far from the carefully choreographed cinematic events that his work has developed into over the past decade. The artist himself, however, prefers to view them all as an integral part of his artistic oeuvre.
The question of representation, understood as the manner in which we create images -and how those images, in turn, conjure ideas, expectations and conventions, is central to Jesper's work. One could say that to Just, what's interesting about representation is that it never merely represents. Rather, it actively performs.
Of course, the question of representation and performance doesn't merely apply to people or characters. Location too can perform. As can language. Music. Sex. Gender. Perhaps this is why the mainstream film is one consistent source of inspiration in his work. By digging into the representations of cinema and beyond, he attempts to elucidate the very limits of our imagination.
The exhibition will also travel to Des Moines Art Center, Iowa, where it will be presented in early 2014. Other venues will be confirmed at a later stage.
The exhibition is curated by Caroline Corbetta, Assistant curator Michael Bank Christoffersen.
SUPPORTED BY
The New Carlsberg Foundation
ALSO SUPPORTED BY
The Augustinus Foundation
Beckett Fonden
Danish Arts Council – Committee for Visual Arts
A SPECIAL THANKS TO
Galleri Nicolai Wallner
Jesper Just - This is a Landscape of Desire is part of HEART's exhibition concept HEARTfuture
