Erdal Bilici’s exhibition Picnic at Flatlands takes its starting point from the video work that has given name to it. In this video, shown in the room furthest back in All, we are on a poetic and explorative walk in and around Værløse Flyvestation, once an airbase that has since become a real estate developer wet dream, while some has been short-term rental workspace and some left abandoned. With two characters, one real and one 3D generated, Bilici walks us through these settings both natural, domestic and hyper-real animated, quietly exploring while moving between them.
The video acts as a backdrop for the artist’s continuing investigation of the transaction between our mundane, monetary desires and our need to connect with something sanctuary or natural. In fetishizing the idea of this ‘something’ it becomes an object – a place we bring the domestic into, controlling, regulating and eating on a blanket in it.
In the broom closet behind All all all’s archive his investigation is put in place as a fragmented, rendered and real landscape, scattered in nooks and through a cellar door that opens into a dusty basement under Kunstforeningen GL STRAND. In Under a Spell lies an abandoned plaster casting of the relief that hangs above Kunstforeningen’s entrance. Warming itself by a campfire it is reflecting on its life, and its sister, hanging out there on display, so near but yet so far away.
Through its three main elements – the namesake video work, the cellar landscape and three print works, Prospect, Dream and Picinic-scape, that greet you when you first enter All – the exhibition explores movements and overlaps between the domestic and the ’wild’, public and private space, the hidden vs. the visible and our sometimes comical sense of ownership over nature. Across Bilici’s works for Picnic at Flatlands, is his common interest in how navigating these overlaps affect our image-making and consuming.
During the exhibition Bilici expands the project through an event that lies between the public and the private - an impromptu poetry role playing performance, led by author Rasmus Daubjerg - inviting guests to join him in balancing the lines between the two spheres.
The exhibition is supported by
Augustinus Fonden, Beckett-Fonden and Knud Højgaards Fond
