Greenlandic Whale bones & stones

Aasiaat Museum Installation 2017

Details:

Venue: Aasiat Museum, Greenland

In 2017 Maria Koshenkova spent the summer in Aasiat – a town in the Disko Bay of West Greenland. Invited by the director of Aasiat Museum Michael Rasmussen, she prepared an exhibition of works produced on location.

Circumstances made it soon clear, that the artist would have to use found objects to work with. The difficulty to transport works of art and materials to such a remote place led to this decision.

Roaming through the island on which Aasiat is situated, the artist collected bones from whales, stones and seal furs. All objects representing leftovers of local everyday life. KJ Greenland offered their workshop to serve as the artist‘s studio. Out of these reduced conditions Maria Koshenkova decided to connect these found objects to each other in a new way.

The stones she collected were wrapped in seal fur. Maybe as an ironic comment on the famous cup by Meret Oppenheim. A cup which was inspired by Picasso, who saw Oppenheim wearing a fur and stated that everyting could be covered in that material. Left over wood from construction works was colourfully painted and used to make a new floor in one of the rooms of the museum. From a fragmented spine of a whale, segments were taken out, copied in pink plastic and put back to become a sculpture.

By subtracting and adding parts of the objects, juxtaposing them and spreading them as a virtual landscape, Maria Koshenkova created an aesthetic microcosm of Aasiat. The materials and works relate directly to the surroundings. The permutations and interventions with the „given“ objects led to forms which can be read as meditations on the basic categories of sculpture: surface, volume and space.

TEXT © Boris Manner 2018 The process was possible with support of Knud Højgaards Fond , Grosserer L. F. Foghts Fond, Statens Kunstfond Special Thanks to Michael Rasmussen , Aaasiaat Museum and KJ Greenland