Exhibitions

Selected Exhibitions and Public Commissions

Vertigo
ARoS, Aarhus, Denmark
9 April – 11 September 2022
Curated by Jakob Vengberg Sevel

Group Exhibition
with Ann Lislegaard, Cao Fei, Jeremy Shaw, Trisha Baga, Julian Charrière

Ann Lislegaard’s Crystal World (after J. G. Ballard) is a 3D animation about a journey to an abandoned laboratory in a wilderness that is slowly crystallizing. As the animation moves through architectural spaces that combine elements of Lina Bo Bardi’s Casa de Vidrio (1951) and Oscar Niemeyer’s Matarazzo Pavilion (1957), quotes from the protagonist of Ballard’s 1966 novel, Sander, describe a zone of entry and transformation. Using it to highlight the contrasts between modernity and entropy, progress and perversion, mineral light and the heart of darkness of enlightenment, Robert Smithson cited The Crystal World in his writings, and the novel was an inspiration for his mirrored structures. Besides Smithson’s The Dead Tree (1969), Crystal World (after J. G. Ballard) includes “characters” such as Untitled (Rope Piece) (1970) by Eva Hesse, elements from Kurt Schwitter’s Merzbau (1920), Lina Bo Bardi’s furniture designs and Bruno Taut’s modernist building Glass House (1914). All of these “virtual replicants” are re-activated in the animation as provisional characters in a depopulated setting where time is ruined.

Selected Press:
“Kunsten at svimle”, Ole Bak Jakobsen, kunsten.nu (2022)
“Konfuse tilstande af svimmelhed understøttes femdobbelt og fremragende i ny udstilling på Aros”, Lars Svanholm, Jyllands-Posten (2022)

Installation views: Ann Lislegaard, Crystal World (after J. G. Ballard), 3D animation, leaning screens.

Unweaving the binary code – Hannah Ryggen Triennale
Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway
5 March – 7 August 2022
Curated by Stefanie Hessler and Katrine Elise Pedersen

Group Exhibition

Kunsthall Trondheim’s contribution to the Hannah Ryggen Triennale 2022 is the international group exhibition Unweaving the binary code. Through the works of eleven contemporary artists, the exhibition explores the legacies of the political, feminist artist Hannah Ryggen (1894–1970) and the Victorian mathematician Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), who is considered the pioneer of today’s computer programs. Lovelace recognized the potential of the punch cards used in Jacquard looms, which work through simple commands of hole or no-hole, and transferred them into code consisting of zeroes and ones that we still use in computers today.

The exhibition looks at the binary system of weaving and coding, present in the warp and weft components of tapestries, the punch hole cards of the Jacquard loom, and the zeros and ones of machine code. Weaving is traditionally considered a feminized activity and has as such been valued and remunerated less than other forms of labor, whereas computers are, still to this date, largely masculinized. Throughout Western art history, weaving has been belittled as a craft and diminished in comparison to art. Ryggen was one of the most inspiring voices questioning this divide between art and craft.

The exhibiting artists, each in their own way, both cite and search for ways to transcend those and other binaries: male and female genders in Western cultures, nature and culture, organic and technological, us and them. From today’s perspective, the exhibition Unweaving the binary code asks what imaginaries we can conjure that undo dyad divides for more complex, more interwoven, more equitable relations.

Installation views: Ann Lislegaard, Spinning and Weaving Ada, 3D animation, 2 projections, 9 mirror-boxes.

1000år1000år
2018-2021, recycled aluminium
Horten, Norway
Opening 11 January 2022

Public Commission

Selected Press:
“Har laget noe for de neste tusen år”, Bjørn Nilsen, Gjengangeren (2022)

Extinct
palace-enterprise, Copenhagen, Denmark
14 October – 18 December 2021

Solo Exhibition

TYRELL
Like you said, Mr. Deckard,
a machine can be a hazard.

2050 is the year a recent Australian scientific report predicts the scenario for the end of human civilization. Now, let us imagine that we have reached the middle of this century and meditate on the state of human extinction, robotics, and nature justice. Ann Lislegaard’s owl belongs to this future. It is a jarring crossbreed of an imaginary species resilient to adapt to the disruptive and accelerated effects provoked by digital technologies that have transformed the structures of nature and society. To the artist it represents an oracle, the bearer of a prophetic message, but the oversized bird can also be interpreted as an automaton created by a techno-taxidermist, the product of a mechanic hazard entangled in relentless logics of algorithmic processes. It is a powerful reminder that if human activity continues to jeopardize nature as it has done for the past five-hundred years leading to the extinction of five-hundred species of animals, we will be left to navigate our world in total blindness.

Taking cues from American author Philip K. Dick’s allegorical description of the owl, Lislegaard appropriates the symbol to address the blindness of human perception and ambition, the futility in trying to understand. Set against a colorful background which is the twilight hour when crepuscular animals – among which owls – come out to hunt, the bird is mastered by an algorithm that determines its movements and speaking in tongues. The storytelling for earthly survival is uttered in a digitally-processed imagery and languages made of accents, rhythms, intonations, pauses, breaks that prevent us to understand its story.

Lislegaard deploys the SF genre (string figures, science fact, science fiction, speculative fabulation), narratives of apocalypse or salvation that are no longer just a hypothesis but a fact. When recognizable, the animal’s language states the extermination of machines – whether mechanical or digital – as opposed to what we would expect: the denunciation of all forms of cynical, well-funded, exterminationist post- capitalism by Homo deus (to adopt the historian Yuval Noah Harari) responsible for the collapse of nature’s biodiverse systems, as well as of human and non-human displacement and homelessness.

“[…] döhp⏑döhp⏑döhp […] gender on distant planets / echo echo […]” it voices out.

The owl is a feminist speaking in tongue. As a non-human feminist, it deploys feminist theory to address the gendered “neutrality” of technology and overcome gender and multispecies differences. The work highlights the artist’s interest in how digital spaces can break down social constructions about gender roles, sexuality and ethnicity. Lislegaard’s life-long experimentation in and entanglement with the age of digitalization forces us to pause from our eroding sense of reality, reversing all bleak prospects.

Diana Baldon
Artistic director, Kunsthal Aarhus

Selected Press:
“10 December”, Simon Starling, kunstkritikk.com (2021)
“Ann Lislegaard: Extinct”, contemporaryartlibrary.org (2021)
“Kunstguide”, Birgitte Ellemann Höegh, Berlingske (2021)
“En ugle, der taler til menneskeheden”, Lisbeth Bonde, kunsten.nu (2021)
“Ny generation af kunstgallerier rykker ind i private hjem og på uventede adresser”, Mette Skjødt, Børsen (2021)

Spor
ARKEN Museum of Modern Art
13 May – 19 September 2021

Group Exhibition

Spor er den syvende i rækken af udendørsudstillinger i serien Kunst i sollys, der inviterer til at opleve kunst på øen omkring ARKEN. Med museets menneskeskabte landskab som ramme har disse udstillinger gennem flere år tematiseret samtidskunstens engagement i økologiske og eksistentielle problemstillinger.

Installation views: Ann Lislegaard, Messages, 3D animation, sound; Ann Lislegaard, Exctinction, sound.

Fertile Ghosts
Kunstfort, Vijfhuizen, The Netherlands
27 September – 27 December 2020

Solo Exhibition

In the Genieloods arsenal boundaries between species become fluid and new hybrids are born. The voices of exctinct bird species are brought into the future, dark clouds of pollen inhabit a blossoming underworld, and a contact zone for interspecies communication is opened. Can a fertile world be re-established?

Kunstfort is proud to present the new solo exhibition by Ann Lislegaard (lives and works in Copenhagen). Lislegaard is internationally known for her visionary videos, animations, and sound-light installations that engage storytelling—specifically science fiction—to explore the malleability of human perception.

The subversive potential of science fiction enables everyday scenarios to be framed by unusual rules. Rather than deconstructing categories of language or meaning, these categories are multiplied, transformed, and transfixed. In Lislegaard’s work, experiences of simulated spheres are created by means of interdisciplinary hybrids and connections – between architecture and cinema, between fictional narratives, and between human beings, machines, and animals.

Selected Press:
“‘Kwetsbaarheid is iets waar we ons meer bewust van moeten zijn’ – in gesprek met kunstenaar Ann Lislegaard”, Nadeche Remst, Metropolis M (2021)

Messages, Ann Lislegaard, Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen

Not Without My Ghosts: The Artist As Medium
A Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition
Curated by Lars Bang Larsen, Simon Grant and Marco Pasi
Drawing Room, London, 10 September – 1 November 2020
Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool, 15 October – 11 December 2021
Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea, 8 January – 13 March 2022
Millenium Gallery, Museums Sheffield, 26 March – 26 June 2022

Not Without My Ghosts, is a major exhibition of artists and works inspired by mediumistic methodologies and their deep cultural history. Bringing together more than 30 international artists from the 19th century to the present day, it explores the changing terms of artistic engagement with mediumship.

The exhibition features works inspired by spirit experiences during séances and trances, to practices of automatism, surrealist experiments, and communications with higher powers and other realities. Not Without My Ghosts addresses 200 years of medium art by exploring how artists have been inspired or directly influenced by forces beyond those accepted by the modern world.

Not Without My Ghosts: The Artist As Medium is a Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition from Southbank Centre, London, developed in partnership with Drawing Room, curated by Lars Bang Larsen, Simon Grant and Marco Pasi.

Installation views: Ann Lislegaard, 1994, drawings made during hypnotic sessions.

Myths of the Near Future
FOTONOVIEMBRE Biennale, TEA, Tenerife
8 November 2018 – 15 March 2019
Curated by Mette Kjærgaard Præst

Group Exhibition
with Ana Mendieta, Ann Lislegaard, Claude Cahun, Dibujo Colectivos (Óscar Domínguez, André Breton, Victor Brauner, Jacques Herold, Remedios Varo, Jacqueline Lamba, Wifredo Lam), Drago Díaz, Jorge Oramas, José Luis Perez Navarro, Juan José Gil, Oreet Ashery, Óscar Domínguez, Patricia Domínguez, Pia Arke, René Magritte, Sebastián de Larraechea and Victoria Jolly (Arte Abisal), Robert Mapplethorpe

This exhibition aims to open up a conversation about otherness, fluidity, and the possibilities of transformation. It brings together artists who share an impulse to question assumptions of truths, and who propose alternative modes of action.

Today we are arguably living in a time of political and ecological crisis. We are realising that the constant drive towards capitalist progress has had immense and destructive consequences for the environment, and at the same time, the global political divide is manifesting in a rise in anxiety related mental health conditions and the loss of human rights that generations before us fought hard to gain.

In response to this crisis, notions of solidarity, otherness, and fluidity become increasingly vital as tools to challenge oppressive conditions. Through states of entanglement rigid hierarchies can soften, and fixed boundaries between self and other open up, creating fluid channels of communication and new possibilities of transformation.

Myths of the Near Future – Entanglement is a journey in search of new ways to communicate with, become part of, and entangle ourselves with our surroundings.

Some Animals Never Sleep
CFHILL, Stockholm, Sweden
15 March – 9 April 2019

Solo Exhibition

Orakel, en animation
2016-2018, animated neon sculpture
Københavns Professionshøjskole, Campus Carlsberg, Copenhagen

Public Commission

Ny Carlsbergfondet:

Det er billedkunstner Ann Lislegaard, som står bag det helt nye stedsspecifikke kunstværk Orakel, en animation 2018 på Københavns Professionshøjskole. Neonuglen kan opleves i Campus Carlsbergs atrium, hvor den udsmykker væggen i 11 meters højde med et vingefang på omkring otte meter. Uglen skiftevis spreder sine vinger, tager afsæt, letter og tager afsæt igen. Bevægelserne animeres af et netværk af neonrør. Kunstværket er realiseret på baggrund af en bevilling fra Ny Carlsbergfondet.

Ann Lislegaard har gennem mange år arbejdet med en række forskellige medier, og hun er særligt kendt for at benytte ny teknologi i sit kunstneriske arbejde. Hun henter inspiration i science fiction-genren som en alternativ indgang til fortælling og de sociale og psykologiske strukturer, som vi forstår verden igennem. Lislegaard er optaget af uglen som et slags orakel, et varsel.

”Tidligt i processen besluttede jeg, at udsmykningen ikke skulle være et stillestående billede af en ugle. Den skulle performe og være i bevægelse, ligesom en animation. De sidste årtier er der forsvundet mere end tre millioner fugle bare i Danmark. Neonuglen kan ses som et mødested, der også minder os om, at vi kan forandre, hvordan vi lever. Uglen sætter af, den letter og den drømmer om at flyve – også i fremtiden,” siger Ann Lislegaard.

Adapt to Survive: Notes from the Future
Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London
18 April – 11 June 2018

Group Exhibition
with Andreas Angelidakis, Julian Charrière, Youmna Chlala, Rainer Ganahl, Marguerite Humeau, Ann Lislegaard and Bedwyr Williams

Engaging with the idea that adaptation is necessary for survival, the artists present films, sculpture and text-based works that explore ideas of change and hybrid forms of architecture, biology, technology, and language.

Taking its title from the phrase adopted recently by the business sector, Adapt to Survive explores the idea that Darwin’s theory of evolution can serve as a metaphor for a future-facing strategy for survival and growth. In recent years, the phrase ‘adapt to survive’ has been adopted by the entrepreneurial start-ups and professional ‘change-makers’, suggesting a fast-paced form of agency that is antithetical to Darwin’s concept of natural selection.

In recent decades, futurology has become established as an area of research combining game theory, statistics, and speculation. Responding to these cultural shifts, the artists in Adapt to Survive make educated guesses about our society’s evolution and progression, but equally convey uncertainty and skepticism about our accelerating patterns of growth and consumption.

Hybrids and Bastards
Shanaynay, Paris
18 March – 16 April 2017

Solo Exhibition

Artificial. Artificial?

Hybrids and Bastards is a survey of sorts, one that doesn’t neccesarily show each work to its best advantage. Instead, they seem to be working in collusion. The exhibition exploits the two-room architecture of Shanaynay and articulates various excitements of anti-hierarchical conditions.

Uncertain Reflections
OR Gallery, Vancouver
4 February – 8 April 2017

Ann Lislegaard, Neil Wedman

In addition, no one today remembered why the war had come about or who, if anyone, had won. The dust which had contaminated most of the planet’s surface had originated in no country and no one, even the wartime enemy, had planned on it. First, strangely, the owls had died. At the time it had seemed almost funny, the fat, fluffy white birds lying here and there, in yards and on streets; coming out no earlier than twilight as they had while alive the owls escaped notice. Medieval plagues had manifested themselves in a similar way, in the form of many dead rats. This plague, however, had descended from above.
– Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

The Or Gallery is pleased to present a new exhibition featuring the work of Ann Lislegaard (Copenhagen/New York) and Neil Wedman (Vancouver). Uncertain Reflections features Lislegaard’s video installation Oracles, Owls… Some Animals Never Sleep (2012-2014) and Wedman’s House of Mirrors #1, #2, and #3.

Lislegaard and Wedman’s respective works in this exhibition employ empty mirrors and doubling – subjects that have long been associated with fascination and foreboding, from monstrous doppelgängers to portals that depict hidden aspects of our character, or some future – often calamitous – event. Mirrors also hold the power to obfuscate, distort and confuse.

Oracles in antiquity were intentionally vague and obtuse so as to avoid precise predictions that were less likely to come true. As Lislegaard has remarked: “Oracles are entities that serve as portals to hidden worlds, connecting to what is buried beneath the surface of things.” As such, they were consulted for guidance regarding important matters and events. Lislegaard’s oracle owls pronounce aphorisms and excerpts from the I-Ching as they are interrupted by digitised noise and dialogue taken from Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s 1982 film adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Their message is garbled, fragmented and confounding.

While mirrors are purported to reflect reality, when assembled in a maze their ability to distort the space they occupy is compounded. The house of mirrors (or “mirror maze”) is a puzzle that has roots in late 19th century Europe, first patented by Gustav and Louis Castan of Berlin. Over the course of the 1890s through the 20th century, halls of mirrors became a mainstay of world fairs and traveling carnivals. The ubiquity of such attractions and their ability to confound human senses make them popular signifiers of physical endangerment and especially mental distress.

Uncertain Reflections marks the sixth of a series of exhibitions and projects curated and produced by Mark Lanctôt and Jonathan Middleton under the title The Troubled Pastoral.

Spinning and Weaving
Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen
12 November 2016 – 8 January 2017

Solo Exhibition

Lislegaard’s work is often based on science fiction, which she uses as an alternative approach to language, gender roles, identity, and the social and psychological structures through which we understand the world. For Lislegaard, science fiction provides a laboratory where ideas can be tested and new alternate scenarios can be created.

Her exhibition at Overgaden is comprised entirely of new works. A central piece is the 3D animation Spinning and Weaving Ada where a spider spins a psychedelic web of the letters ADA LOVELACE. Ada Augusta Lovelace was a mathematician who in the first part of the 18^th century wrote the algorithms that came to form the basis of the world’s first software and computer. She is today seen as not only a pioneer in computer technology, but also as a forerunner of the development of the internet. The animation is an homage to Ada Lovelace and the feminist qualities that are associated with spinning and weaving: forming patterns and shapes with threads, connecting, creating nets and networks.

The point of departure for the sound and light installation, Shadows of Tomorrow, is the science fiction film Contact in which a female scientist after years of searching and listening captures sounds from outer space. These sequences of sounds and codes are perceived as a language from an unknown entity wishing to make contact. Using this science fiction film, Lislegaard has created a vocabulary of manipulated sound passages that are re-recorded with a human beatboxer into a new and abstract language. The soundtrack is played out in the installation in several sequences together with multiple lights: an algorithm prompts the coloured lights to switch on and off. Performed through the beatboxer’s body and with resonance in the installation, Lislegaard’s Shadows of Tomorrow proposes hidden messages and future events. With the use of an alternative vocabulary and sounds channelled through the body, the beatboxer voices the unknown.

Selected Press:
“Ann Lislegaard at Overgaden, Copenhagen”, Yuki Higashino, springerin, issue 2 (2017)
“19. december”, Sanne Kofoed, Kunstkritikk.com, (2017)
“Netværkets mørke hjerte,” Louise Steiwer, Weekendavisen (2016)
“I øjenhøjde med algoritmen”, Pernille Lystlund Matzen, Information (2016)
“Lislegaard væver en fortælling om sprog og kommunikation,” Torben Weirup, Berlingske (2016)

Pollen Messages
Viborg Kunsthal
August 26 – November 27, 2016

Solo Exhibition

Selected Press:
“Forestillinger om fremtiden”, Trine Rytter Andersen, kunsten.nu (2016)

Shadow Ya Ya
Kyoto Art Center
October 27 – December 25, 2015

Solo Exhibition

Kyoto Art Center is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Ann Lislegaard. Ann Lislegaard’s 3D animation video installations were on view, to much acclaim at PARASOPHIA: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015.

In Ann Lislegaard’s work, experiences of simulated spheres are created by means of interdisciplinary hybrids and connections – between architecture and cinema, between fictional narratives, and between human beings, machines, and animals. In this context, which draws on the historical residues of culture and technology while building on feminist gender theories, the boundaries between the real and the imagined are blurred. Concrete and simulated worlds interpenetrate and are reorganized within one another, a world within a world within a world. Lislegaard’s simulations and animated works create a centrifugal effect by means of sound, light, and image.

Science fiction writers, and in particular Samuel R. Delany, J.G. Ballard, and Ursula K. Le Guin, may be viewed as a sort of generator or catalyst for creating simulated worlds, extreme states that seem to herald the disintegration of the very texture of civilization, or dystopian representations of a nature that exists beyond “place.” The exploration of these simulated worlds provokes a sense of estrangement, as well as a new reading of our own present.

For this exhibition, she will present her animations Time Machine (2011) and Crystal World (after J.G. Ballard) (2006) both of which are exhibited for the first time in Japan.

Paraspace
Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel
10 June 2015 – 16 January 2016

Solo Exhibition

In Ann Lislegaard’s work, experiences of simulated spheres are created by means of interdisciplinary hybrids and connections — between architecture and cinema, between fictional narratives, and between human beings, machines, and animals. In this context, which draws on the historical residues of culture and technology while building on feminist gender theories, the boundaries between the real and the imagined are blurred. Concrete and simulated worlds interpenetrate and are reorganized within one another, a world within a world within a world.

Lislegaard’s simulations and animated works create a centrifugal effect by means of sound, light, and image — for, as Maurice Merleau- Ponty states, “To conceive space, it is in the first place necessary that we should have been thrust into it by our body.”

Science fiction writers, and in particular Samuel R. Delany, J.G.Ballard, and Ursula K. Le Guin, may be viewed as a sort of generator or catalyst for creating simulated worlds, and different identities as well as dystopian representations of a world that exists beyond “place.” The exploration of these simulated worlds provokes a sense of estrangement, as well as a new reading of our own present. In conversation, Lislegaard pursues twisting and multilayered trajectories, which unfold in the space between dreams and descriptions of reality. She talks about the avant-garde American filmmaker Maya Deren (1917–1961) — a dancer, choreographer, and photographer who created poetic, spiraling psychodramas that exceed familiar hierarchies of narrative and editing; the Italian-Brazilian revolutionary architect Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1922); the Cuban-Mexican interior designer Clara Porset (1895–1981); as well as women artists such as Kay Sage (1898–1963) or Eva Hesse (1936–1970), who studied (among other things) crystals and organic structures as a means for defining non-linear time. Lislegaard’s world is rooted in techno-sexual and gender evolutions, unfolding in the space between body and bio-technology, in the spirit of the “Cyborg Manifesto” published in 1985 by the scholar and critical thinker Donna Haraway — a feminist reading of technology in a world that blurs the boundaries between living creatures and machines. New technologies, Haraway argues, provide a theoretical and practical advantage in the context of gendered power relations, since the politics of the cyborg present technological symbiosis as a dynamic exploration, rather than merely as a male fantasy about “natural control” and the submission of nature, technology, and “the others.”