Dyveke Bredsdorff: Strangers

20 jan 20234 mar 2023

Strangers marks Bredsdorff’s first solo exhibition in Denmark, and comprises a recent large scale installation of sewn cyanotypes which advance emancipatory images of kinship and resistance beyond normative definitions of identity.

Conceived as a single cohesive installation of works, Strangers brings together a series of newly realized cyanotypes – spaced apart around the gallery, the works maintain a strong sense of reciprocity, together and yet apart – a community of individuals. Women Walking / Women Marching (Night Walkers) (2022-2023) stands out as Bredsdorff’s largest work to date – numerous pieces of silk are sewn together in a composition that refuses symmetry in favor of a complex play of depth through varying layers of blue tones and imprinted forms. In this work, Bredsdorff pays homage to the many women who encounter death on their way home at night. A series of figures depicting heeled shoes, which Bredsdorff poetically exposed on silk in the moonlight – through summer, autumn and winter – draws us close to the idea of bodies. As ephemeral as illusions, the body and its stories are never revealed, although their absence becomes viscerally corporeal.

Bredsdorff’s reflections are based on real images, and it is the very impression left by their absence that repeatedly surfaces and haunts. For although some forms are abstract, the viewer comes across recognizable details – be they part of a body, or the delicate imprints of eyelashes. The long single exposure blur the trace of the subject. Concealing the physical into abstraction becomes for Bredsdorff an attempt to reclaim the female form, in a temporality that exceeds the sedimented coordinates of being. Ultimately re-joined in a symbiotic rhythm, the body becomes one with the natural world – and here, undulating water, drifting clouds and wandering creatures appear to emerge from the depths of the blue-toned silk.

Informed by radical-feminism, experimental cinema and literature, Bredsdorff uncovers the depths of violence we encounter every day in contexts of social and physical demarcation. By exposing the alleged neutrality of symbols and forms which are often deployed to represent the physical within the social body, Bredsdorff confronts the objectification and entrapment of the female form, through a practice that encompasses analogue photography, 16mm film, performance and poetry.

Kilde: Matteo Cantarella