Jakob Kolding

• 09.06.–22.07.2006

From June 9 to July 25, 2006, Galerie Martin Janda is showing work by the Danish artist Jakob Kolding. For years the artist has addressed issues involving space and place in the context of urban und suburban architecture and ways of life. Kolding, who grew up in exurban Copenhagen in a community founded on utopian theories, thematises the reciprocity of aesthetic and socio-political utopias and the resultant issues regarding use and social problems.

“How are different places described and understood? How can you get some kind of understanding of a place if you do not see it in its context of interrelations and as a continuing process as opposed to a static form?” — Kolding views the structuring of architecture and urban planning as related to musical composition methods: beats, variations and structures. Space is never static; it is in flux.

“I got three hundred reasons to prove you wrong”, says Spiderman, surrounded by utopian models on one of the large photo collages. Kolding links references to youth culture, music, the skater-scene and soccer with issues of architectural theory and urban planning, thereby shifting these from the level of a scholarly structural analysis to an open platform: nothing is written in stone, no definitive judgment is made. Kolding uses different media in his work, which is linked both to openness and the concept of incompleteness: sculptural interventions in space, paper collages and computer-generated photo collages.

In response to the gallery’s different levels Kolding presents two separate conditions of his sculptural work. While his space conglomerates, which call to mind urban structures, are expressly intended to be set on a base, for the upper level he devised interventions occupying the space. Taking as point of departure the prevailing ways of viewing modernistic sculptures, Kolding refers with both of these forms to the changes in his oeuvre: from the traditional architecture model to organic structure.