Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld, Leap Into Colour, 11 June – 5 July 2015

Kunsthal Charlottenborg is proud to present Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld’s installation Leap into Colour. The exhibition constitutes part of the artist’s PhD project Rehearsing Reparative Critical Practices. 

1930-1950: Cairo is a vibrant cosmopolitan centre for art, cinema, music, cabarets and political ferment. The Armenian Egyptian photographer Armand (Armenak Arzrouni 1901 Erzurum – 1963 Cairo) captures the artists and politicians frequenting his studio in Downtown, Cairo.   

2012.: Philippe Arzrouni (the son of Armand who lives in Denmark since the 1960s) returns to Cairo for the first time in 30 years to find out what has happened to his father’s photographs. Memories from the past interfere with the present and fragments of archival material interweave in the current and become inextricable.

Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld’s artistic practice explores the digital image’s memory and affect, as an assemblage between bodily and technical performance. Her video works are created in context-specific situations in collaboration with participants who act as themselves and in collaboration with other artists and filmmakers. The video installations collect fragments of memories, archival material and re-staged footage to provide the audience and participants with space and time to gather the fragments they are presented with into new assemblages.

Research and exhibition

Practice based ph.d. projects are a growing discipline, and Kunsthal Charlottenborg is happy to build this bridge between exhibition and resaerch by hosting Leap into Colour, which constitutes a part of Katrine’s artistic research project, which seeks to develop the conceptual and artistic framework for ‘reparative critical practices’. Drawing on American literary scholar and queer-feminist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of the reparative reading; Katrine Dirkinck-Holmfeld expands on this notion and builds on it to encompass artistic practices focusing on digital image production.This has led to the production of a series of video installations Djisr (The Bridge), Lebanon, 2008; the three-channel video installation Tid: Aalborg / Sted: 2033 (Time: Aalborg / Place: 2033), Denmark, 2010; the four-channel video installation movement, Beirut, 2012; and Leap into Colour, Denmark/Egypt/Lebanon, 2013–present. She holds an MFA in visual art from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art in Copenhagen and an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is a PhD fellow at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen.

The exhibition is generously supported by The Danish Art Foundation, CKU, B&O samt DNP