'The Apartment' by Marie Lund (featuring Frederik Worm) at Croy Nielsen, Vienna

The Apartment
Stops and Starts
Sleeper
Next Day Writing
Window*


Door handles, handrails, light switches and taps are devices of everyday use, each related to a specific action. They play an essential but rather modest role, one of form and functionality, as means to an end. The new aluminium sculptures by Marie Lund linger at the margins of the gallery space. Suspended by straps, they are placed at the edges between wall and ceiling, between floor and wall, as if they want to avoid being at the center of attention. Rather, they refer to what sur- rounds them, working as a support structure for the space they inhabit, and pointing to something that lies outside themselves.

The titles* of the sculptures stem from Belgian film maker and writer Chantal Akerman’s book My Mother Laughs. Describing mundane every-day scenes of living with and caring for her dying mother (while she tries to preserve a space for her own work), Akerman tells of the time spend and held together by the daily repeated doings; writing shopping lists, moving from one room to the other, cleaning the dishes, habits of napping. In the in-between spaces of these activities, details of family history, descriptions of pain (found woven into love), failed relationships and self-doubt seep through. To write about death, in the end, means to write about life, and it is this withdrawal from and subtle pointing-to the ‘actual‘ subject that is similarly immanent in Marie Lund’s sculp- tural practice.

Produced by the artist through a process of repetition, continuously compressing and stretching the flat metal sheet into compound curves with the help of a so-called English Wheel, the rhythmical and repetitive labour is left visible as marks on the shiny surface. Lund’s formal sculptures mime both functional objects such as pipes or ventilation ducts, as well as decorative elements like stucco or floor panels, pretending to belong to the space, but in fact peeling off and pointing back to the architecture that holds them.

Within this space, three photographs by Frederik Worm are shown, introducing the on-going conversation between the two artists into the exhibition. His works, too, point to actions that elude us. They are moments of stillness; accumulation of time, capturing what takes place just next to something.

In The Apartment, the works are not interested in making monumental statements, but rather communicate from the margins, through repetition and sparse punctuation. Reserved and almost mute they speak about their conditions of production; conversations, books beside a bed, romantic partners, and modes of display; distance and encounters in cohabiting, as a choreography of rehearsal and maintenance – while the day still hopes for possibility.

— Inga Charlotte Thiele