O Rose is a collective exhibition, which grew out of a collegial relation and friendship between Danish sculptor Marie Lund and British-Palestinian filmmaker and painter Rosalind Nashashibi. The two artists work in different media and with different aesthetics. But there turns out to be methodological overlaps in the way they conceive their works and in the way their works open up to and absorb the lived life in which they are created.
The conversation between the two artists takes its starting point in Rosalind Nashashibi’s film Denim Sky. In this domestic sci-fi film, Rosalind Nashashibi explores ways of forming a community around her single parent family through, amongst other means, journeys into space and non-linear time. With this film in mind, Marie Lund created a new series of sculptures, Daily, which, through repetition and variations, similarly collapses the expectation of a linear time. Made from residual materials, paper pulp and rubber granules, the sculptures – in their own way – also speak of fragility and strength.
In the new film The Invisible Worm, made for the exhibition, Rosalind Nashashibi explores the multiple personas and roles of the artist. Visual artist and co-writer on the film, Elena Narbutaitė, who is also one of the main characters in Denim Sky, appears in the film, together with Marie Lund, Rosalind Nashashibi, her son Pietro, a male model and a cat, each embodying artist and muse. The exhibition’s title refers to William Blake’s mystical poem The Sick Rose, 1794, which also guides the film’s poetic and inscrutable structure. Both Marie Lund’s and Rosalind Nashashibi’s studios appear in the film, as do Den Fries’ galleries.
Both paper and film are porous. Making works in paper pulp or with 16 mm film requires laborious processes that extend over time and are characterized by the unpredictability of the materials. Cracks can appear in the surfaces of the paper shells when the paper pulp solidifies, just as dust grains can get stuck in the delicate film emulsion or on the camera’s lens and infiltrate the images like small flickering, almost invisible worms. Similar to the material processes shaping Marie Lund’s work, the situations captured in Rosalind Nashashibi’s films are open to influence – initiated to then be allowed to unfold on their own terms.
Neither the sculptures nor the films are static, autonomous works. Rather, they are containers or frames for each other and a kind of host for the relationships that exist between them and that weave in and out of them. Rosalind Nashashibi’s collaged narrative flickers luminously between persons and narrators as well as physically between the exhibition spaces. Marie Lund’s mute sculptures spread out serially in the other galleries, they are not concluded objects either. On the contrary, the sculptures insist on a temporality that is not really unlike that of the film. The works of both artists are fundamentally deriving from thinking about relations and exchanges, about what continues and what changes.
About the Artists
Marie Lund’s artistic practice arrives from a contemplation on the interdependence between objects, space and bodies. Her sculptural works contain references to existing, functional objects, which she releases from their original use and transforms into abstract structures through tensile material processes. In resistance to sculpture as autonomous objects, they outline and activate their environments, turning to ideas of hosting and of exchange.
Rosalind Nashashibi is a filmmaker and painter living in London. Shot on 16mm, her films start from close observation of life and move into storytelling, often considering relationships in communities and extended families. In her paintings, overloaded motifs and existing paintings are treated with seriousness whilst wrongfooting the viewer into questioning themselves as to why they are engaged. Rosalind Nashashibi supports a free Palestine.
About the Exhibition Series at Den Frie
O Rose is part of Den Fries’ exhibition series Valgslægtskaber, which unfolds connections and conversations between artist colleagues. In this fourth edition, works by Marie Lund (DK) engage with the works of Rosalind Nashashibi (UK/PS).
Read the exhibition catalogue here
Photo: David Stjernholm / @david_stjernholm
