Out of Pocket
Kristine Tillge Lund (DK)
23 February – 1 April 2023
Curated in collaboration with visual artist Owen Armour.
Imagine the sound of a car door slamming. And then another. A whole series of car doors slamming, endlessly. Hollow, sharp, muted, loud. An engineered sound. And then: silence. Even the silence inside the car is part of its design, marking a short break from the outside world, a private sphere in the midst of the busy world, city, traffic, that the car ads are trying to sell us. The car is a product and a status object that we consume in order to reconstruct ourselves within a certain lifestyle, not just to meet a set of fairly stable needs. It is simultaneously a functional and an aesthetic object – developed to be driven, seen, touched. The car is an extension of our body, an armour that gives us superhuman strength, makes us strong, heavy, untouchable. Is there an inherent dilemma in having access to the acceleration that the car represents, which is so far beyond our own human speed, becoming speed?
With the exhibition Out of Pocket, Kristine Tillge Lund presents captivating and abstract ceramic objects that examine the car as a design object and a fetish. With analytical curiosity, the car has been disassembled, chopped up and divided into separate components. Four doors, cast into the shape of car doors from different 1990s cars, a shelf unit and two containers are presented as disconnected, isolated objects in the room. The car is a thoroughly designed object, but its design is intended to be inconspicuous. It is only when it is removed from its customary context that the design itself stands out – not least the design elements seen in relation to the body and as an extension of it. Through the car’s design, we can discern the proportions of the imagined driver and the social perceptions associated with the interior space of the car. Inside the car, the body is placed into a fixed position that has been determined by others. There are no other spaces where that particular design is used or makes sense.
The car is also a mode, a place and a state. An object we might desire as well as a means to achieve something we desire. Cars have an erotic quality stemming from their shapes and our own fantasies of power and speed, status and freedom. Think of Lolita’s road trip with Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’s novel: it represents their feeling of freedom but also the forbidden, perverse obsession that does not allow them to stand still and which becomes a prison to them both.
But where is the car in this exhibition? The abstract and isolated shapes distributed throughout the room are disconnected, only held together by an idea. All the objects come from car interiors and are within reach from the driver’s seat. At some point, these fragments have been picked up and stamped out of the flow of time in order to become part of this collection. The displays give rise to unusual associations. The door shells have been left to dry in an oversize dish rack, and the walls have been equipped with pockets. What are the implications of the notion of washing a car in a kitchen sink? The endless fantasies about women and cars – the car as a woman, women posing on top of cars – have been turned inside out and reassembled. The new fantasy is an anachronism, or it exists outside time: here, the colour of a 1970s sportscar is combined with car doors from the 1990s and ashtrays for a smoking driver; it is liberated from the shape of the car. From this display, you can select individual components, put on the Transformer’s armour, walk into the desert and roll down the window as you observe the sky and the passing cars.
Anne Kølbæk Iversen
