SOAP by Emilia Bergmark and Maria Gondek 16.09.21 – 09.10.21
“Heads” Emilia Bergmark. Photo courtesy of the artist.
SOAP is an art installation and a kitchen sink drama by the artists Emilia Bergmark and Maria Gondek
16.09-09.10 2021
SIRIN Gallery x Nicolaj Bo, Gl Kongevej 103 1850 Frederiksberg.
The exhibition will be part of Copenhagen Art Week.
Evens during Art Week
Wednesday 29 September - Artist talk: Emilia Bergmark and Maria Gondek in conversation with curator Nanna Balslev Strøjer 17.30 - 18.30
Livestream of the conversation will be on our Instagram page @sirincopenhagen
Sunday 3 Oktober – SOAP is the meeting point of the Art Week Bike Tour 13.00 - 13 30.
More information about bike tours here and here
SIRIN Gallery is thrilled to present the duo exhibition and kitchen sink drama SOAP by artists Emilia Bergmark and Maria Gondek, hosted by kitchen manufacturer Nicolaj Bo in their Frederiksberg showroom.
If a kitchen sink could speak, what would it say? In the exhibition SOAP Maria Gondek and Emilia Bergmark investigate the cultural and psychological narratives of domestic life, highlighting the kitchen as, either in real or imagined terms, the heart of the home.
The concept of the ‘conversation kitchen’ (samtalekøkkenet) was introduced in Denmark in the 1990s as a step up from a utilitarian workstation and exclusive housewife territory. The ‘conversation kitchen’ was a new social gathering place for the entire family, and the grand, minimalistic designer interiors, complete with cooking islands and glossy cookbooks displays, became not only a functional top priority for the modern family but a reflection of a successful life and contemporary lifestyle. This transition and gradual commodification of private life became a creative catalyst for both Bergmark and Gondek. The artists actively explore the grey area between commodity and art, and work to uncover the phenomenological aspects of design theory: how we shape and animate things – and, in turn, how things shape and animate us.
In the exhibition SOAP we are introduced, among other things, to a kitchen sink with screenwriter ambitions, who is directing a play with her friends Mr. Muscle, Ariel, Ajax, and Vanish as the main protagonists. Bergmark’s sculptural sound installation humorously references British 1950’s ‘kitchen sink dramas’ and American ‘soap operas’, exposing central feminist issues of agency and division of labour. As for Gondek, she has created sculptural versions of male and female anxieties put together by pipes and tubes - materials that are integrated into the kitchen but hidden behind walls. Gondek reflects on degrees of intimacy in the wider domain of the home, nuancing the relation between private and public, desire and control, between commodity and happiness.
Thus SOAP is an exhibition that foregrounds the situatedness of the kitchen within the complex, emotional, political, and temporal topography of domestic life, shedding light on how the kitchen, and the home in general, can become a repository for, and representative of human anxieties, dreams, and fears.
As the whole exhibition unfolds around a kitchen, the collaboration with Nicolaj Bo continues the dialogue between the field of interior design and contemporary art that both SIRIN Gallery and the two artists are engaged with.
Text by Nanna Balslev Strøjer
Exhibition documentation by Robert Damisch
This project is realised with the support of Statens Kunstfond.
Exhibition opening hours
Mon-Fri 11-17:30
Saturdays 10-15
PRESS
Girls Are Awesome, interview with Emilia Bergmark
Cobobo.dk - art critic and curator Connie Boe Boss
