Intro: You're not fooling anyone when you say...

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.

Udstilling på Hjorten!

I have been invited to participate in an exhibition in Copenhagen.  It is to be in an ex-bodega in the district of Nørrebro.  A bodega is used in the English language and is distinguished as being a cellar or shop selling wine and food, a store house for maturing wine.  Along with the invitation I was sent images of the property.

I was developing work from London, responding to an email narrative and photography of a site.  Bodega Hjorten was open during my last stay in Copenhagen but I had only heard of it and its elusive owners and customers from rumours.

Excerpt from email...

'The carpet sticky, with spills and stains. The walls heavy from smoke, eyes meet as entering "welcome".  The Indian thrones on the wall. He looks like Sitting Bull. The many rooms, dark paneling, beating marks on the door. Everything witness what has been. Now the future is uncertain.'

Perhaps a lost visitor's description of an abandoned space with a romantic undertone.  Then I turn to the stark iPhone photos of the space.  I see the potential of it as a stage with the comical look of the Native Indian mural on the wall I see the space as a bare playground.  Compared with the show at Sheik Shawarma, the establishment has closed up and only echoes of past activities remain.  We were temporarily in charge of the space, the new hosts, creating a new home for strangers.

Strange homings

The fashion of taking over ex-establishments is common to the nature of gentrification.  The attraction of outdated/nostalgic decor, child like attraction for the kitsch...is this the new exotica?

Excerpt from an article by Diana Thater:

'We're so conditioned by narrative, that there's a beginning, middle and end.  But when you break apart those conventions, stepping outside of the model, stepping outside of time and space and looking in, you see what those rules are.  If you can go back into that space, then perhaps your perspective can be not as colonialistic or object-subject-orientated or binary which, culturally speaking are ways we understand animals, ecosystems and language- but something else within that space and within art.'

I think back to my voyeuristic recordings of various 'strangers' from two ends of a scale, attractive to completely unattractive to a public.  I am thinking of three recordings in particular: a street performer, preacher and a statue.  These are characters I have recognized and observed on my travels.  The idea of the site and story of Bodega Hjorten was an interesting playground to expand on these observations, a method of homing strangers.

Parrot

Imaginings of a past bodega as we observe the remnants.  A fictional location.  Visitors to such a bodega bar would consume alcohol and drugs, providing food for fictions, a place where truths become tales and tales become truths, a constant swaying between concepts of reality with every swing of the door as a new customer enters.  A pencil sketch of a clock hand strikes 11 and the time is set.  The owners of Bodega Hjorten are gone and we are left with the stories of the residents in the building, anonymous spectators to the business, and the frozen face of a puzzled Native American Indian letting the off key decor speak of its treatment.  The Bodega Hjorten members are mythologized, in the face of neutralization as the 'for sale' signs go up and keen artists and entrepreneurs walk in.  Curiosity fills the neighbourhood.

And what is this of a parrot?  I cannot see a parrot here?  Walking into the bodega we see a junction with another set of doors into the space but we are oblivious to a parrot lighting are way as it noses in on the property's occupation.  On the wall, in between the signs of 'Velkommen' and 11 o'clock is a puzzle of words travelling slowly around a circumference of what appears to be the mathematical format of a clock.  Stand still enough and we notice its journey moving once per second.  Slip to the left and we enter the corridor with teases of a labyrinth of rooms.  We see the tufts of grass as the Direktor's old office continues to grow new pastures.  Startled by a ring of light we see a parrot this time watching our way as the moods of colours and atmosphere creep past one another on route to the kitchen, where the cold of the tiles shock the heat of the fist punctured door.  Continue the circle and you will find your way back to the entrance and now exit.

If we observe the bird species looking, the speed of the batting of eyelids is comparable to a mechanical shutter or in the installation of Parrot the speed of a second as the clock mechanism continues to tick.  The three objects in the space create one piece, whose object nature turn into temporal interventions integrated in the space by relative positioning and merging with the awkward decor they support the exclusive, constructed time of Bodega Hjorten.

(Photography courtesy of Tina Umer)