Prisma (Past Presents Future), 2021, steel, mannequin, mirror, hammer, suitcases
Detail, Prisma (Past Presents Future), 2021, steel, mannequin, mirror, hammer, suitcases, detail
Installation view
Installation view
Installation view
Intermodular Habitat, 2021, 65 x 90 x 120 cm, steel, MDF, faucet, drain, miniature telescope
Intermodular Habitat, 2021, 65 x 90 x 120 cm, steel, MDF, faucet, drain, miniature telescope, detail
Intermodular Habitat, 2021, 65 x 90 x 120 cm, steel, MDF, doorbell, laser cut gecko
Intermodular Habitat, 2021, 65 x 90 x 120 cm, steel, MDF, doorbell, laser cut gecko, detail
Intermodular Habitat, 2021, 65 x 90 x 120 cm, steel, MDF, sockets, bulbs
Intermodular Habitat, 2021, 65 x 90 x 120 cm, steel, MDF, sockets, bulbs, detail
Installation view
Pas Partu, 2021, 13 x 33 x 43 cm, laser cut catalog, epoxy resin
Installation view
Claustrum (Warped Model of Consciousness in the Cyber Space Age), 2021, 18 x 32 x 100 cm, steel, SLA
3D print
Retrograde (New Morning Star), 2021, dia 130 cm, lamp, locusts, epoxy resin
Retrograde (New Morning Star), 2021, dia 130 cm, lamp, locusts, epoxy resin
Installation view
Census, 2021, 50 x 65 cm, steel, glazed stoneware
Census, 2021, 50 x 65 cm, steel, glazed stoneware
Mask (Omni), 2021, 18 x 37 cm, glazed stoneware
Mask (Rhizome), 2021, 18 x 35 cm, glazed stoneware
Mask (Rhizome), 2021, 19 x 33 cm, glazed stoneware
Mask (Alter) 2021, 16 x 34 cm, glazed stoneware
Mask (Screen), 2021, 18 x 34 cm, glazed stoneware
Mask (Rhizome), 2021, 20 x 30 cm, glazed stoneware
Mask (Void), 2021, 19 x 35 cm, glazed stoneware
Mask (Xeno), 2021, 20 x 36 cm, glazed stoneware
Mask (Rhizome), 2021, 17 x 37 cm, glazed stoneware
Mask (Omni), 2021, 17 x 35 cm, glazed stoneware
wake of the achievements of a given time, enforcing development and change. The transformed, external
surroundings have influenced beliefs and the sciences, which has helped to frame the everyday life and our
understanding of the World. Through the development of new cosmologies, attempts have been made to
find meaning in the World-altering shifts.
expanded, is the focal point of the investigations in Jan S. Hansen’s exhibition Pas Partu. The exhibition
presents a number of condensed understandings of our present time, connecting around the fact that they
are all influenced by new technological and neuroscientific discoveries in the world community, defined as
“The Cyber Space Age”. Online or away from the keyboard, the Internet’s expansion of our physical and
mental reach almost becomes tangible to us when solidarity is found in online communities, and when the
mobilisation of movements takes place globally. Our presence has stretched out into the Universe over the
last half century, and this expanded spatiality is continuously manifesting itself in our everyday lives. A new
hyperreality presents itself, where we, as an example, can observe mediated representations of Mars´
landscapes through screens in the form of photographs, videos and sound clips.
impression that the exhibition rooms exist outside of time. This is done by matting the glass in the windows, only letting diffused light enter, while a gray fabric separates the entrance of Kunsthal NORD from the
exhibition rooms. Despite the significant industrial traces of the kunsthalle in the form of ventilation pipes,
steel beams, and factory glass, the transformation gives the audience the experience of entering another
world.
consists of three elements that look like architectural models. The miniatures each appear with few, to the
scale, disproportionately large installations; like a spout on a faucet; a gecko divided in two by a partition wall
and luminous bulbs placed in rows. As surreal models for human’s ability to calibrate themselves to live in
different habitats, the artwork series speaks to a mental and physical readiness for change. In the adjoining
room, a fractal star with locusts hangs from the ceiling. The star is a so-called “Herrnhuter Star”, used by the
Christian congregation “Brødremenigheden” as a symbol of the city Christiansfeld, near Hansen’s own
birthplace. The locusts bring to mind the ten plagues of the Old Testament and set out to see how the
Universe has previously and primarily been the domain of religions as well as inspired religious motifs and
creation myths. In the work “Retrograde (New Morning Star)”, Hansen draws our attention to parts of the
dynamics in the construction of human narratives and worldviews as well as how scientific discoveries
challenge one of the territories of religions.
between the personal and the collective. With a laser cutter, a small square has been cut out of the middle of
the front cover of a Whole Earth Catalog from 1970, picturing one of NASA’s “Blue Marble” photographs of
the Earth, as seen from outer space. The catalog is encapsulated in a thick seal of resin and placed on the
floor under the title “Pas Partu”. The Whole Earth Catalog was an iconic catalog within “Do It Yourself”,
alternative education, and ecology and is said to be a forerunner to the Internet. It can be compared to the
free Internet-based encyclopedia, Wikipedia, which is continuously rewritten through the collaborative effort
of a global community of users. The work “Pas Partu” points to the double presence of humans in The Cyber
Space Age; a double-position, which becomes evident in the recording of new territories. From NASA’s
recent mapping and geologic records of past ecosystems and their impact on today’s climate change and the
development of new landscapes in the online that allow virtual communities that transcend hierarchies, class
and physical affiliations to bodies that live in these landscapes and inhabit the physical and virtual worlds.
Human’s conflicted position holds a complexity that was first conceptualized in the map-territory relation, a
theory by Alfred Korzybski, where the map is easily confused with the landscape it represents. In other words,
the map is a picture of the landscape, but also controls how we read it. Changing times and cultures have
always believed that the maps they drew and navigated were objective and transparent. But all maps are
always subjective and grounded in a given time and cultural worldview. The work “Pas Partu” shares its title
with the exhibition and refers to the passepartout as a symbol of how we develop and frame a subjective
image of our time. The title also points to the additional etymological meaning of the word, as a universal key, and thus further covers an underlying drive in human development and science’s search for ways to
unlock the riddles that have yet to be uncovered.
Cyber Space Age)” in the farthest room of the kunsthalle, that shows a reproduction of the, purportedly,
human center for consciousness which is situated in two symmetrical sheet-like structures of gray matter in
the brain, and until recently has been inaccessible to researchers1
. Through a dialogue with a team of
scientists from Atatürk University in Turkey, Hansen has been granted access to work with 3D-files of the brain
structure. With a frozen donor, the research team has been able to laser cut a human body into millimetre
thin slices and subsequently scan the body to make 3D renderings of the two claustrums. Hansen uses the
generated data and files to create artistically modified versions of these in correspondingly millimetre thin
layers, rebuilt with 3D printing. In an artistic adaption, Hansen has enlarged and stretched the proportions of
the organ lengthwise and materialised a container for consciousness that spatializes the idea of past, present,
and future. In this way, the artwork attaches itself to the exhibition’s installations and sculptures, which in
pendulum-like movement sway between new and older rejected positions and examine the interplay
between body and consciousness, and how they in a cyclical rhythm continuously uncover and (re)discover
new grounds.
position. As found, processed, and made objects, the artworks of the exhibition serve as a container for
different beliefs and circumstances of the times, where human’s image of themselves and their surroundings
was in accordance with the changing industrial progress and existential views. Thus, the exhibition can be
seen as a social scientific collection where different times collapse into one another. An expanded notion of
time is introduced, where Hansen’s research of the plasticity of the human consciousness appears. This is
illustrated in the way the exhibition invites us, through its “passepartout”, to see the objects from a coherent
and larger perspective. Further, this “passepartout” creates a space for reflection, where we can look at the
actions and values of our time and contemporary history, expanding our consciousness.
Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Visual Arts, Copenhagen. Exhibitions include Overgaden Institute of
Contemporary Art and Huset for Kunst og Design. He is co-director of Simian, an exhibition space for
contemporary art in Copenhagen.