During my recent years at art school, I learnt to develop ways of embracing the functioning of our current society and to enjoy the possibilities of how the rhythms generated within can strengthen observation, particularly with regards to how acute we are when recognizing our emotions. In my undergraduate show work, I reintroduced the mobile phone ring tone, a recurring playful interruption in my work illustrating this constant anxiety of interference in current day society. The mobile phone poses as a musical instrument in my work. In These are my knees everyone! (2014), the ringing of a telephone startles the atmosphere, it tries to alert us, instead, as it persists to ring, I begin to sing along and create my own version of it and gradually it starts to dissolve into the space.
To experience new cultures and varying modes of society, I find travel vital for the expansion of my work. Since graduating, during the summer of 2014, I moved to the city of Copenhagen in Denmark where my stay culminated in a collaborative exhibition at Sheik Shawarma restaurant in Copenhagen with my friend and fellow artist Anne Langgaard. This was our second collaborative exhibition in what we hope to be a continuing series.
Being a guest of the city of Copenhagen, I had to announce myself in some way and as a partaker in this exhibition my announcement was more in the form of an intervention in a running establishment in the heart of the city. It was a temporary space for me to exercise my feelings towards generally more 'comfortable' ideas of living as part of a society. I want to keep testing my understanding of the contexts I become part of by creating spaces or sets within existing environments and seeing how far such interventions should be integrated.
In Copenhagen, I enjoyed the risks of the chosen intervention format. my expressions were in the firing line of blunt comments and rhetorical questions of the customers, who were not expecting to see an exhibition in their local Shawarma restaurant. Above all, I am devoted to the openness of situations, the sharing of new experiences to encourage flexibility of ideas. From this experience, I realized the importance of locating existing spaces where intervention can take place whilst travelling to new places where such research can manifest itself.
Text on press release for exhibition at Sheik Shawarma:
"Besides it has to be about the universe…now how do we turn that waterfall on?"
Anne Langgaard (DK) and Ana Maria Lima Dimitrijevic (GB)
Exhibition at ”Sheik Shawarma”, Nørrebrogade 90, 2200 København N
Tuesday 9th September 2014, 17-21 only .
Sheik Shawarma, Nørrebrogade 90. It is here Mustafa runs a Shawarma bar. Ana Maria and Anne walk in thinking aloud. In the distance, waterfalls continue to run in the stillness of the digital print as we sit and watch the cooking of Shawarmas on rotation and the stirring of juice. Yes, we sit and wait for what exactly? Mustafa knows. Mustafa looks around his Shawarma bar and sees nothing. Nothing but people. People ready, not for Shawarma but ready for something less alien. The Shawarma arrives wrapped in foil with a napkin to clear the mess.
Anne Langgaard (DK) Ana Maria Lima Dimitrijevic (GB)
At Sheik Shawarma. Owner Mustafa Barakat appears working behind his counter.