Pernille With Madsen (DK)

°1972

This Danish artist works with video, photography and installation to investigate the architectural spaces and structures around us. Madsen sees video as a medium that confuses our senses and our perception of the dimensions, as a relatable three-dimensional room is reproduced on a flat surface thereby introducing an element of disorientation. The interest in the collapse of well-known structures, where spaces are transformed and become alien and strange to us, is a key theme in Pernille With Madsen’s work.  

Pernille With Madsen created Foreign Material with Yvette Brackman (US) °1967

Yvette Brackman is an American artist and writer who lives and works in Copenhagen. Her work often draws on the history of the Soviet Union from where her family emigrated in 1959. Brackman’s art refers to Russian Constructivism, a revolutionary art movement, which originated around 1919 and saw art as a practice for social purposes. She often involves audiences and communities in her work to explore issues of common responsibility and social relationships. It draws on various mediums of expression in which she uses a combination of crafted elements and time-based media to create narratives that unfold in space.

Dissolve (2010) 

video installation, 6’30”    

Dissolve shows a series of camera movements which pan in and out of a space, obscuring our sense of inside and outside, surface and space, reality and fiction. As in a kaleidoscopic displacement of space and perspective the spectator is sucked into a universe of reflections, shimmering stripes and vibrating dots which enticingly glides across the wall and leaves the spectator in a state of spatial uncertainty and dizziness. Our points of reference vanish. We are left wondering what is inside and what is outside.  

Untitled - Stands (2013)

video installation, 6’  

The Untitled – Stands video records mock-ups of the KV Mechelen stadium. These mock-ups merge with images of the actual stadium, creating an ambivalence of scale and space. At times the video dissolves into what looks like modernist abstraction rather than a stadium. It plays with the outward characteristics and architectural details of the building. Stadiums often appear on television during football matches. Here, too, the stadium appears on television, but then in its own right.    

Produced by Contour 2013.

Foreign Material (2013)

papier-mâché, chain, motor

Two artists worked together to produce Foreign Material. Yvette Brackman, originally from New York but now living in Copenhagen, gave one of her works to the Danish artist Pernille With Madsen as a present. It consists of a chain and a papier-mâché ball made from the correspondence between Brackman and the Danish immigration office. Madsen attached the artwork to a motor, which makes it revolve and spin as a globe. Madsen herself has this to say about Foreign Material: ‘I took this weapon of powerlessness, this ball of hard-hitting paper and returned it to bureaucratic inertia. I catapulted it back into its own self-contained circulation somewhere between aggression and weightlessness.’


Produced by Contour 2013.