Trash, consumption, control: Birke Gorm collects scrap and flotsam from her surroundings and the public dump, then sculpts, sews, and assembles the residue material that is often cast out (or dead) from a capitalist society’s point of view.

Entering the exhibition, rusted iron tools—used pitchforks, saw blades, barbed wire, hooks—are hung from the ceiling in elongated swung clusters. Defying classical sculptural monumentality, these “mobiles” are rustling, fragile, and brittle in their dark contours. The upside-down treatment of the unsafe, sharp materials testifies to Gorm’s anarchist, even surrealist pull, insisting on creating value or seeing beauty where there—at least from a financial perspective—is none.

On the surrounding panels sits a collection of dolls. Each is tied from tea towels, rags, or napkins and dyed brownish red. The red tone is cooked. The dye is created from a so-called “dirty pot”—an ancient almost witch-like brewing method, where rusty iron, water, and vinegar slow boils repeatedly. Against today’s expeditious production, the small dolls are thus forwarding hands-on and traditional, often female, circular crafts of binding, coloring, and figure-making.

In the second space is a floor installation extending wall-to-wall, made from waste cardboard and quotidian materials, recycled into a miniature city. The poor assemblage creates a tiny world emulating questions of chaos and order, territory and property,
as understood by a child, through play. The accumulation of material becomes an image of the structural do’s and don’ts of public behavior—the unpicking of what’s high and what’s low, what’s dead and alive, what’s right and wrong, what’s trash and what’s not.