Lina Hermsdorf

AS IF SAND HAD BEEN SPRINKLED INTO THEM

05.10. - 29.10.2016

To view an excerpt of the video, please click here.
Displaying images is a completely different experience to watching them on television. I could liken it to a human blushing, only it happens across the whole spectrum of colours, not just the reds, and a pixel at a time. You could say whenever I’m switched on I’m in a state of warm, constant, transmutable embarrassment, and that’s irrespective of what I’m showing — bomb attack in Manhattan, Formula 1 racing, Danish period drama. Every image is a unique incidence of cringing, sixty times a second.
Three monitors and a pair of speakers shift from mere exhibition equipment to animate subjects with a nervous sense of autonomy, communicating to each other in looped awkward dialogues and broaching topics like technological ageing and biological homeostasis.
One speaker ponders going up the entropic stream. One screen has a strange obsession with ETA Hoffmann’s dark novel the Sandman, Freud’s inspiration for his writings on the uncanny. What sort of ego might a television have? Could news-broadcasts be sparks of a super-ego? Static interference an id?
In Lina Hermsdorf’s exhibition ‚As if sand had been sprinkled into them‘, devices are rendered both intelligent and deeply fallible — equal parts fawning, self-conscious, neurotic and well-read. The theatricality of the art object is not only heightened but transformed into a strange techno-animist ritual.
Text by Dan Meththananda
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In her practice, the examination of the borderlines between the living and the lifeless has become a continuous theme . What does one experience in this time as (a)live and real? Can we still apply these categories or have we arrived in a world which some define as “liquid” or “atmospheric”. Having worked in the field of theatre and gradually transitioning into the visual arts, Lina Hermsdorf´s practice is informed by cross-disciplinary techniques and an interest in narrative strategies.
Often mediated through lecture performances or installations, the essayistic works address questions around epistemology and its relation to the cybernetic paradigm. The protagonists range from humans to fresh water animals or technological devices, telling tales of ageing, diet, origin, exercise, generational shifts, bilateral symmetry, immortality, green tea, entropy and the duplicate body parts of crabs. They are constantly changing and (un-)learning entities, adapting with each new environment and responding to the architectural situation that they encounter.