ART CITIES: Copenhagen -Signs & Wonders

Michael Stevenson, Signs & Wonders, 2015, Kunsthal CharlottenborgMichael Stevenson’s work re-tells recent histories using allegory in and amongst historical facts. His work (paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations and film) utilises narrative forms that transform truth and fable. It engages with absurdities that arise when universal ideas relating often to culture or economics take hold in insular situations and seem to be both radical and perplexing.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Kunsthal Charlottenborg Archive

The exhibition “Signs & Wonders” is a new comprehensive installation created especially for the Kunsthal Charlottenborg and is the first solo exhibition in a Scandinavian art institution with works of the New Zealand artist Michael Stevenson. Six home-built flight simulators placed in a circle take exhibition visitors on a network of silent, imaginary plane rides using a physically constructed cockpit and a virtually constructed terrain in the form of computer software. The pilot trainers are small enclosed booths, crudely built to resemble the interior cockpits of small planes. They are scattered through the gallery like sheltering tents, or confessional boxes. Each one contains a seat for the pilot, and a “control panel” improvised from sheet metal. Each one is directed to a screen showing a silent flight simulation. The colors look oversaturated and pedagogical, as if they were chosen by a designer for training purposes rather than aesthetic realism. This makes the simulations look both dated, and earnest. The simulated flights are between isolated runways in Papua New Guinea and Melanesia; places that remain some of the most isolated on earth. The highland runways of Papua New Guinea are notoriously some of the most hazardous and dramatic on earth: short earthen strips that drop directly from the high jungle into the clouds below, so that a pilot taking off has to conduct a controlled nose dive off the side of a mountain simply to gather enough speed to fly. Scattered around the floor of the cockpits are paperback books, mostly from the 1970s and 1980s. Many are representatives of a particular genre: post-apocalyptic Christian sci-fi. As if to emphasize the role of repetition within the artwork, the simulators are paired, so that each plane on its route passes its double in an imaginary airspace. Aerial activity, even on behalf of a Risen Christ, can and must be made routine, and it’s this strange amalgam of the divine and the mundane, theology and traffic, visions and optics, that seems to fascinate Stevenson. He developed the work in conjunction with the anthropologist Joel Robbins, who in a paper dryly notes “During my fieldwork among the Urapmin (a group of 375 people living in the Sandaun Province of Papua New Guinea), daily life was characterized by the regular arrival in the community of reports that Jesus was about to return”. Connecting subjects such as religion, aviation, education, anthropology and globalisation, the exhibition continues on from Michael Stevenson’s previous projects whose characteristic sculptural installations interlace anecdotes, history writing and current affairs. Stevenson’s practice constantly reveals the fascinating and complex relationship between notions of the specific and the universal.

Info: Curator: Henriette Bretton-Meyer, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Kongens Nytorv 1, Copenhagen, Duration: 21/11/15-21/2/16, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Sun 11:00-17:00, Wed 11:00-20:00, www.kunsthalcharlottenborg.dk

Michael Stevenson, Signs & Wonders, 2015, Kunsthal Charlottenborg Michael Stevenson, Signs & Wonders, 2015, Kunsthal Charlottenborg Michael Stevenson, Signs & Wonders, 2015, Kunsthal Charlottenborg Michael Stevenson, Signs & Wonders, 2015, Kunsthal Charlottenborg