03.13.2010 | 04.25.2010
LOOKING FOR DONKEYS | NANNA DEBOIS BUHL

Nanna Debois Buhl practice is research-based with references to literature, documentary and experimental film. She works conceptually with film, writing, drawing, photography and sound. Her recent projects have focused on how language, signs, and architecture play a role in shaping individual and national identities, and how they change over time and in different contexts. Debois Buhl’s solo exhibition at SAAG will bring together a body of works, which explores Denmark's colonial history in what is now the U.S. Virgin Islands, an area where Danish, U.S., and African-Caribbean histories intersect. Through photography, drawing, film and text the artist maps the traces of this colonial history—its images and representations—and considers their present implications. The central installation The Mapmaker (2008), for example, reflects on the acts of mapping, naming and photographing as ways of occupying space, pointing to the overlap between the territory claimed by the colonizer and mapped tourist routes.

Central to the artist’s project and to the exhibition is the idea of a two-way encounter, of traveling and exploring as ways of inverting the positions of “here” and “there.” The video work Postcards-Tivoli (2006), filmed in the Danish amusement park Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, takes us back to Danish soil. In images, the work explores the park’s orientalist architecture, built in the mid 19th century and modeled on buildings found in France and England. A soundtrack reflects on the European vision of the East and on a series of “colonial exhibitions” on display in the gardens, intended to familiarize a Danish audience with the people in the Danish colonies.

In conjunction with the exhibition, SAAG will co-commission an artist book, titled A Journey in Two Directions. In the publication, Debois Buhl considers the role of maps, travel journals, paintings and photographs in the formation of national self-understanding, then and today, and how this imagery has been used as tools of power, and later forgotten, suppressed or romanticized. Commissioned writers shed light on the artist’s project from other angles. A reading and research room will spatialize and activate components of the book, making visible how this case-study of Nordic Colonialism draws on both on the real and imagined material, from many different sources.

--Milena Hoegsberg, Curator

Milena Hoegsberg is a New York-based curator, currently working on exhibitions, research, and arts related projects on a freelance basis. She earned her BA in Art History at Columbia University, with a focus on 20th century art and contemporary video, media, and time-based arts, and her MA at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. Her thesis exhibition, Another Time, included films by Chen Chieh-jen, Tacita Dean, and Peter Hutton. She worked closely with curator Maria Lind on The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art (2008), a large-scale group exhibition and research project at The Hessel Museum of Art. Her curatorial contributions included a visual display of literature on the documentary, a slide lecture performance by Andrea Geyer, a screening of the work of Chantal Akerman, and a local television broadcast series of artist videos. She recently completed a large research project on biennials, and co-authored a paper on “discursive” biennials, which will be included in The Biennial Reader (forthcoming, Bergen Kunsthall, 2010).

Nanna Debois Buhl is a New York-based Danish artist. She received her MFA from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, (2006) and participated in The Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (2008-09). She was Artist in Residence at LMCC’s Work Space Program, New York (2007-08), and The Caribbean Museum Center, US Virgin Islands (2008). Debois Buhl’s work has been exhibited internationally. Recent exhibitions include: Black Atlantic, Ar/Ge Kunst, Italy; Whitney ISP Studio Exhibition, Art in General, NY; Picture History, Museet for Fotokunst, Denmark; Muted, Studio Museum, NY; Transfer - Overdragelse, Overgaden – Institute of Contemporary Art, Denmark; Socle du Monde Biennial, Herning Art Museum, Denmark; Facing Locality, Caribbean Museum Center, US Virgin Islands; The Biennial of Young Artists, Estonia; Tourist's Tale, Aarhus Kunstbygning, Denmark. Collections: The National Museum of Photography, Denmark.

Documentation photography courtesy of David M.C. Miller and Petra Mala Miller, 2010.