Past

Christian Vind: Dr. Topic

22 Aug – 25 Oct 2014

In the prologue to his famous book Ficciones, the author Jorge Luis Borges writes that everything allotted to him in life – every book read, every stone found on the beach, every speck of dust under the shelf – is first and foremost a resource that has entered the mental archive that forms the source of his own works.

One of Christian Vind’s recurrent techniques is collage – in the original sense of the word of gluing fragments of different objects together to create new, ambiguous and often schizophrenic assemblages. His work, which includes books, exhibitions in dialogue with historical figures, paintings and works on paper, poses fundamental questions about the habitual ways in which we categorise and systematise the world. There are references to the many attempts of art history to register visual impressions, as well as the collections of curiosities and spectacular private collections of former times, with the kind of inexplicable layers of meaning and causal connections the rationality of present-day science could never subscribe to. Coincidence and the influence of the individual subject on how we archive, sort and organise our knowledge form the basis for Christian Vind’s extensive case history of an exhibition at Overgaden.