NOWs: The Trail or Time Between Trees

21 September - 24 November 2019 / Nows

The Trail or Time Between Trees

solo exhibition by Rune Bosse

Overgaden neden Vandet 17

DK-1414 København K

Opening

20 September 2019, 5 – 8 pm

What happens to an art institution when it has been abandoned by people and nature takes over the reins? In the interface between art and nature, Rune Bosse challenges the boundaries of what an art exhibition can be and how far an art institution is prepared to go in this, his first major solo exhibition.

Since he graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2016, Rune Bosse has been working specifically with nature as both a liberating and poetic force, but also as a destructive and threatening space outside human control.

For the first time in Overgaden’s thirty-three years of existence, the art centre faces closure for a period of about six months in connection with an extensive and much-needed refurbishment. Rune Bosse has seized this unique situation and created an exhibition which, being the last one before the refurbishment, leaves Overgaden’s ground floor in ruins. The gallery spaces emerge with smashed windows, knocked-down walls, and overgrown floors and, due to the damaged electricity supply, the spaces will be enveloped in growing darkness during the exhibition period, as the period of daylight will gradually decrease. An apocalyptic wasteland where nature is allowed to take over Overgaden, so that the boundary between inside and outside, past and (possibly) future, is blurred.

For the exhibition, Rune Bosse leaves plant species to sprout and grow indoors, so that they penetrate the walls and erode significant parts of Overgaden’s interior. The artist has entered into a collaborative arrangement with the landowner August Hage at the manor Oremandsgaard Gods, who has more or less given him a free rein to use the forest belonging to the manor as both a laboratory and a materials store for the production and examination of organic links. All plants and greenery later to be transferred to Overgaden will grow organically and undisturbed throughout the exhibition period – beyond the control of the art centre.

The exhibition unfolds as a course of events where the awakening process of nature gradually intensifies. The audience steps into a laboratory which presents the artist’s examinations of organic material and plants over a period of time. Jam jars containing plants and work tables with studies of current and potential projects and processes appear side by side with tree roots and parts of plants, fungi, etc. From here, we move, via soil-covered passages, into the wood where a path leads us to the heart of the wood – where circular and ritual elements also form part of the encounter between man and nature.

With this uncompromising intervention at Overgaden, Rune Bosse offers visitors a radically different and unique exhibition experience and contact with nature, which is stimulating in view of a future where humans, potentially, no longer control nature or have been displaced by other species.

Rune Bosse (b.1987) graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2016, combining this with studies at Olafur Eliasson’s experimental art school, Institut für Raumexperimente, Berlin. Bosse’s shows include the group show Festival For Future Nows at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, in 2014, EXTRACT at the exhibition venue Kunstforeningen GL Strand, Copenhagen, in 2017, the ARoS Triennial The Garden also in 2017, and the exhibition Jordforbindelser (Down to Earth) at Fuglsang Kunstmuseum in 2018.

Installation view. Photo: Anders Sune Berg

Installation view. Photo: Anders Sune Berg

Installation view. Photo: Anders Sune Berg

Installation view. Photo: Anders Sune Berg

Installation view. Photo: Anders Sune Berg

Installation view. Photo: Anders Sune Berg