With Freja Gøtke and Hilma Bäckström
9. September – 15. October 2022
Opening hours: Thur – Fri 13-18, Sat 11-16

For All all alls opening exhibition artists Gøtke and Bäckström will build a total installation bar, out of found and gathered reflective materials, a room within the exhibition room, functioning as a meeting place between audiences and artists, humans and objects. In the bar they serve drinks and elaborate desserts, and orchestrate social events that invite the public to participate. The bar is thereby a container for an investigation of the social event as a performative rehearsal but also as something that sustains us – through both the refreshments and human connection being served by the artists behind the counter. In Time Losers, Bäckström and Gøtke create odd set pieces out of wood, mirrors, silver and metals to stage social being in. Here things can appear and disappear; people, objects, art works and situations enter and re-enter the scenography, continuously activating and affecting it.

Throughout the exhibition period the duo invites you into their silver colored lair for happenings, dinners with weird elaborate cake sculptures and performances that explore the social gathering as both an artistic situation and an inclusive, communal one. Through open events, the artists become the Time Losers that work to slow down and soften the hard borders and corners of the exhibition space.

Time Losers is also an ode to the found object, to the practice of gathering. As two magpies, Gøtke and Bäckström collect and create intimate rooms with reflective shiny things that mirror and imitate each other and the surroundings. The artists work with ready-mades, gathering and collecting to make new artworks, as a fundamental part of their practice. With these they create social spaces that negotiate the flux between public and private, common and artificial. Their practice is an anti-hierarchical approach to objects that dissolve categories of aesthetic/non-aesthetic, valuable and not, and sustainability is at the centre. Giving credit to the everyday object they wish for the life of the non-human things around us to have common value, and for us humans, to have meaningful relations with them.

As tenders to their bar and hosts to their dinners, the Time Losers inhabit a role of maintenance – maintaining the life of the guests and objects and the life that happens between all the parties.

About the artists:

Hilma Bäckström (SE,1991) works with social installation, involving photography and sculpture. Her practice revolves around collecting as an act, an archive and a method.
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Freja Gøtke (DK,1991) works in the fields between film and sculpture and installation. Her work centres on the life of objects and their interactions with humans.

They are both based in Vienna Austria, and started their mutual practice as students at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien. The duo will be creating another instalment of their bar installations for Kunsthalle Zürich, November 2022.