(English below) 

I samarbejde med Kunsthal Charlottenborg inviterer Bikubenfonden til Kunstsalon VISION, hvor billedkunstner Marie Munk mødes med Hendrik Folkerts, der er kurator for International Samtidskunst på Moderna Museet i Stockholm, til en samtale om Munks praksis. Samtalen finder sted i biografen på Kunsthal Charlottenborg onsdag den 1. Juni 2022 kl. 17-18.

Marie Munk er udpeget til Bikubenfondens Artistic Practice program for særligt lovende kunstneriske praksisser. Formålet med interviewsalonen, som er en del af programmet, er at undersøge en dansk praktiserende kunstners særlige tilgang til kunsten og det potentiale, der ligger heri. Kunstneren vælger selv deres interviewpartner i forbindelse med salonen.

Om Marie Munk
Marie Munk, f. 1988, beskæftiger sig hovedsageligt med skulptur og installation. Hendes aparte totalinstallationer, hvor skulptur, bevægelse, lyd og interaktion indgår, prikker til normative opfattelser af kroppen i en tid, hvor digitale universer, teknologisk innovation og effektivitet karakteriserer og kontrollerer vores adfærd og kroppe. Hun skaber alternative virkeligheder, der balancerer det legende og fantasifulde med det uhyggelig og frastødende. Ved, sammen med elementer af science fiction og humor, at bruge silikone som en metafor for det kropslige, konstruerer Munk abstrakte hypotetiske fremtidsscenarier, der sætter spørgsmålstegn ved aktuelle tendenser i samfundet.

Marie Munk bor og arbejder i København. Hun modtog sin MA - Mixed Media fra Royal College of Art i London i 2016. Munk udstiller verden over, både solo og i samarbejde med kunstner Stine Deja. Marie Munk modtog i 2020 Carl Nielsen og Anne Marie Carl-Nielsens Talent Pris, var sammen med Stine Deja nomineret til Remmens Kunstpris i 2019 og er modtager af Statens Kunstfonds Arbejdslegat i 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 og 2021. I 2022 har Marie Munk haft en stor solo-udstilling på Gl. Holtegaard i Danmark, og er i øjeblikket aktuel i Politikens forhal med udstillingen Devine Desires, en udstilling skabt sammen med med billedkunstner Stine Déja.

Marie Munks praksis har en enestående og anderledes æstetik med sine stærkt kødelige, abnorme og groteske skulpturer i bløde silikonelignede materialer. Hun udfordrer vores normale opfattelse af kroppe og kødelig substans. Vi har svært ved at placere hendes skulpturelle scenarier i en normaliseret samtid eller fremtid, hvilket er meget interessant og provokerende. Er vi i fremtiden – i en fremtidens samtidskunst, hvor store væsener af og med ukendt karakter og intelligens bebor planeten? Er vi hinsides homo sapiens?

Marie Munks kunst bevæger sig i en urolig - art spekulativ fremtids-samtid, og spås en stærk fremtid i national som international kontekst.
- Bikubenfonden

Om Hendrik Folkerts
Hendrik Folkerts (M.A., Art History, University of Amsterdam) is Curator of International Contemporary Art at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Folkerts previously held positions as Dittmer Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago (2017-2022); as Curator at documenta 14, Kassel/Athens (2014-2017); as Curator of Performance, Film, and Discursive Programs at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2010-2015); and as the Coordinator of the Curatorial Program at De Appel arts centre, Amsterdam (2009-2011).  

Folkerts specializes in commissioning and an artist-centered curatorial approach that highlights notions of care, hospitality, and process-based exhibition-making. He has curated numerous solo and international group exhibitions as well as collection presentations, new commissions, and program series, anchored in the expanded field of performance and building on feminist, queer, and anti-colonial histories of art.  

At the Art Institute of Chicago, he has organized solo exhibitions and presentations of Igshaan Adams (2022), Mounira Al Solh (with Jordan Carter), Vaginal Davis (with Solveig Nelson), Anne Imhof, Naeem Mohaiemen (with Robyn Farrell), Malangatana Ngwenya (with Felicia Mings and Constantine Petridis), and Vivian Suter, as well as Iterations, a series of large-scale performance commissions that presented new works by Alexandra Bachzetsis, Cevdet Erek, Paulina Olowska, Cally Spooner, and Evelyn T. Wang, among others. Moreover, he shepherded several key acquisitions and gifts for the Art Institute’s collection and was closely involved in curating the constantly evolving presentation of the museum’s modern and contemporary art collection. 

As part of the curatorial team led by artistic director Adam Szymczyk, Folkerts was responsible for the two iterations of documenta 14, with a particular focus on the exhibition held in Kassel, Germany. In addition to overseeing numerous new commissions with artists from Australia and New Zealand, Southeast Asia, the SWANA region, and Europe, he contributed to the publications and programs that were presented as part of the exhibition as a whole.  

The program of exhibitions, performances, and lectures Folkerts curated at the Stedelijk Museum, revolved around hosting artists and thinkers through duration and dialogue, while rethinking the museum as a critical site of public discourse and engagement. Taking place both inside the museum and at various partner institutions in Amsterdam at a time the Stedelijk was closed for renovation, this public program reversed the roles: to see the museum through the eyes of the city and the communities it served and insert that experience into the DNA of the institution.  

Folkerts has (co-)edited various publications and catalogues, for instance Alexandra Bachzetsis’ monograph: SHOW/TIME/BOOK BOOK/TIME/SHOW (forthcoming 2023), Katalin Ladik: O-oooooopus (forthcoming 2022), Igshaan Adams: Desire Lines (2022), Mounira Al Solh: I strongly believe in our right to be frivolous (with Laura Barlow, 2019), The Place of Performance (Stedelijk Studies edition, 2015), Facing Forward: Art & Theory From a Future Perspective (with Christoph Lindner and Margriet Schavemaker, 2015, and Shadowfiles: Curatorial Education (with Ann Demeester and Edna van Duyn, 2013). His texts have been published in journals and magazines such as South as a State of Mind, Mousse Magazine, Artforum International, The Exhibitionist, Metropolis M, Art & the Public Sphere, as well as numerous exhibition catalogues. Most recently, he contributed to monographs on Alexandra Bachzetsis, Brendan Fernandes, Anne Imhof, Bouchra Khalili, Carlos Motta, Vivian Suter, Andy Warhol, Samson Young, and Evelyn T. Wang. 

Sted og tid:
Livesamtalen finder sted onsdag 1. junij kl. 17-18 i biografen på Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Kongens Nytorv 1,1050 København K, Danmark

Deltagelse i salonen koster 10 kr. + gebyr. (50 pladser)

Salonen foregår på engelsk.

Om Interviewsalonen
I interviewsalonen zoomer Bikubenfonden ind på en enkelt eller to kunstneres praksis med fokus på kunstnerens lovende og nyskabende tilgang til kunsten. Kunstneren er udstillings- eller forestillingsaktuel og har markeret sig banebrydende og nyskabende over kort tid. Interviewsalonen er et ”nærstudie” og undersøgelse af kunstnerens særlige praksis og potentiale, et værk- og personnært interview. Kunstneren(e) vælger selv sin interviewpartner i dette samtaleformat.

Kunstsalon VISION er Bikubenfondens samtaleformat på kunstområdet.

Der optages video fra salonen til brug i Bikubenfondens portrætserie, Artistic Practice. Læs om Artistic Practice her: https://vimeo.com/user100347497

ENGLISH:

Kunstsalon VISION at Kunsthal Charlottenborg - conversation between visual artist Marie Munk and curator Hendrik Folkerts  

In collaboration with Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Bikubenfonden hereby invites you to Kunstsalon VISION, where visual artist Marie Munk will be meeting with Hendrik Folkerts, who is the  curator of International Contemporary Art at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, for a conversation about Munk's practice. The conversation will take place in the screening room at Kunsthal Charlottenborg on Thursday, May 19, 2022. From 5:00 PM until 6:00 PM.  

Marie Munk has been singled out for inclusion in Bikubenfonden’s Artistic Practice program for particularly promising artistic practices. The objective of the interview salon, which is one aspect of this program, is to examine a practicing Danish artist's special approach to art and the potential that is seated in this. In connection with setting up the salon, it is the artist herself who chooses her interview partner. 

About Marie Munk  

Marie Munk, who was born 1988, is chiefly engaged in creating sculptures and installations. Her eccentric total installations, where sculpture, movement, sound and interaction enter into the mix, tease our normative perceptions of the body at a time when digital universes, technological innovations and effectiveness characterize and control our behaviour and our bodies. She creates alternative realities, which balance the playful and imaginative with the dreary and repulsive. By making use, along with elements of science fiction and humour, of silicone as a metaphor for the bodily, Munk constructs abstract hypothetical future scenarios that set question marks alongside current trends in society.  

Marie Munk lives and works in Copenhagen. She earned her Master of Arts (in mixed media) degree at the Royal College of Art in London, from where she graduated in 2016. Munk is showing her work all over the world, in solo exhibitions as well as in collaborations with visual artist Stine Déja. In 2020, Marie Munk was awarded the Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen Talent Prize, and in 2019, she was nominated – together with Stine Deja – for The Remmen Foundation Art Prize. She has also received support for her work in form of several Statens Kunstfonds Arbejdslegat stipends in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021. In 2022, Marie Munk has had a large-scale solo show at Gl. Holtegaard in Denmark, and for the moment, she is active in Politiken's foyer with the exhibition, “Devine Desires”, a show created together with Stine Deja. 

Marie Munk’s practice embodies a unique and different aesthetics, with her intensely carnal, abnormal and grotesque sculptures in soft silicone-like materials. She challenges our ordinary perception of bodies and corporeal substance. We have difficulty placing her sculptural scenarios within a normalized present or future age; this is something that is very interesting and provocative. Are we in the future – in a future’s contemporary art, where large creatures of and with unknown character and intelligence inhabit the planet? Have we moved beyond Homo sapiens?  

Marie Munk’s art is moving around within a turbulent – kind of speculative future-age, and a dynamic future in national as well as international contexts is being predicted.  
- The Bikuben Foundation 

Place and time of interview:  

The live conversation is slated to take place on Thursday, May 19, at 5:00PM- 6:00PM, inside the screening room at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Kongens Nytorv 1,1050 Copenhagen K, Denmark  

Participation in the salon costs DKK 10 + service charge. (There are 50 seats)  

The salon will be unfolding in English.  

About the Interview Salon  

In the interview salons, Bikubenfonden zooms in on a single or two artists' practice, with a focus on the artist’s/artists’ promising and innovative approach to art. The artist is currently exhibiting or performing and has distinguished her/himself, in the course of a short time, as groundbreaking and innovative. The interview salon is a “close-up study” and an investigation of the artist's special practice and potential, an intimate work- and person-centred interview. In this conversational format, it is the artist(s) who chooses her/his/their interview partner.  

Kunstsalon VISION is Bikubenfonden’s conversational format in the area of art.  

A video registration of the interview salon is going to be recorded, for eventual use in Bikubenfonden’s portrait series, “Artistic Practice”.  

Read more about Artistic Practice here: https://vimeo.com/user100347497 

The Art of Marie Munk 

Marie Munk’s works present a qualified response to an age in which digital universes, technological innovations and efficiency characterise and control our bodies and behaviour. Munk’s striking total installations, incorporating sculpture, movements, sound and interaction, disrupt normative views of the human body, creating alternative realities balancing the playful and imaginative with the eerie and repulsive. Combining science fiction and humour, she uses silicone as a metaphor for the bodily, constructing abstract, hypothetical future scenarios that question current developments in contemporary society. 

One of Marie Munk’s sources of inspiration is the inventor and futurist Raymond Kurzweil’s theory of the deepening convergence between genetics, nontechnology and robotics (GNR), leading to a biotechnological revolution led by a superior artificial intelligence. The predicted result will be a human upgrade, including the achievement of immortality inconceivable for humankind at its current stage of development. Marie Munk’s version of this revolution, on the other hand, does not involve an upgraded, optimised humankind. Hers is a creature of an entirely different kind, a new species or breed we as yet have no relationship to or conception of. Her organisms seem to have a life of their own that is difficult to grasp. They are made by humans, but it is not entirely clear whether they are also made for humans. They appeal and repulse simultaneously, capable of evoking empathy and a sense of alienation – both at once. 

Marie Munk (b. 1988) lives and works in Copenhagen. She graduated with an MA in Mixed Media from the Royal College of Art in London in 2016. Munk has exhibited widely internationally, also in collaboration with the artist Stine Deja at gallery untitled projects, HeK - House of Electronic Arts, Tranen Center for Contemporary Art, PERMM Museum of Contemporary Art, MdbK – Museum der bildende Künste, NCCA Arsenal – National Center of Contemporary Art Arsenal, EXPO Chicago, Galerie Lisa Kandhofer, Mira Digital Art Festival, Museum Villa Rot and Annka Kultys Gallery. 

Marie Munk is represented by untitled projects, Vienna. In 2020 she was awarded the Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen Talent Prize, and in 2019 was nominated with Stine Deja for the Remmen Foundation Art Prize. She has received annual working grants from the Danish Art Foundation every year since graduating.  

Marie Munk’s art, with its heavily fleshed, abnormal and grotesque sculptures in soft, skin-like materials, has a unique, extreme aesthetic that challenges our usual view of bodies and flesh. It is difficult to locate her sculptural scenarios in any present or future we can imagine, which is both fascinating and disturbing. With a humoristic yet dystopian expression Munk’s scenarios investigates the current tendencies in the relation between the body and technology. 

Marie Munk’s art operates in an unsettled and unsettling future-present and has huge international potential. 

- The Bikuben Foundation