OPENING
Friday the 9th of June 17:00 - 20.00

What does it mean to touch and be touched by something, someone? What lies in that touch? A feeling of connection, reciprocity, care, healing, forgiveness? Stigma is a branding, visible on the skin. But stigmatizing and marginalization happens invisibly. Does a soft touch remedy the burning shame? The “double sensation” of touch implies that it is impossible to touch yourself and feel that touching at once. When reaching out to touch someone, do you imagine the sensation of their skin to yours, or having in mind their feeling of your touch? Even if the person doesn’t recognize you, doesn’t even recognize themselves, will they feel your touch, and presence? The humming and clicking of devices and cells transmitting inside, between, around.

A malicious devil lingers at the heart of experience, doubting that what I perceive is the same as what you perceive; that our perceptions and ideas of the world correspond. We reach out towards the same object, but the sense and sensation of it, and how we attach ourselves to it, differ. And this devil is an even trickier one when it comes to self-perception and the blind spots to our own being illuminated through the eyes of others. Deflecting mirrors all around.

For long, the technique of the photograph held an indexical promise of truth: what is in the photograph was at some point present in front on the shutter. In times of AI this has turned into mere probability, or plausibility. AIs hallucinate information from noise, and we are presented with faces and happenings more real than reality. Nothing is left unretouched.

We are surrounded by and connected to images and technologies calculating and depicting, but also producing and manipulating, our perceived world. Our eyes are capable of processing 36,000 pieces of information per hour, sending electrical signals to the brain that processes and interprets as well as being formed and molded by the input. The notion of plasticity within neuroscience replaces the idea of the brain as machine with that of a brain-world. Some (silicon billionaires mainly) fantasize about the possibility to upload their brain to a digital infrastructure and are decapitated at death to have their brains frozen down. It will require a feedback system as complex as the human body to sustain those minds.

My intuitions – of my body, my perceptions, and my own person – are indeed pragmatic illusions sustaining my functioning among phenomena and other beings, a sort of scaffolding device, an exoskeleton of conventions, and agreements, bouncing me softly off surfaces without collision or unwanted friction. But what do I even know of this cohort of cells, transmitters, and neurons that I am? Medicine may explain to me the condition that I suffer from and its pathologies, but it fails to translate values and indications to the lived experience of dealing with symptoms on an everyday basis and the aspirations, or ambitions, I hold under my breath.

How to come to terms with our reality and the reality of what we are as physical, biological, and thinking beings in a time when we put great trust in technologies’ ability to enhance, interpret, and repair? This question lingers as the centre of Niels Christensen’s exhibition displaying examples of photographic and filmic techniques, audio- and visual effects connected to brain impairments and repairs, as well as healing touches, and a general curiosity towards relations between mind, body, world, and technologies. Presented in a down-played manner that reflects an educational or communal bulletin board aesthetics, the associative, networked posters leave space for the viewer to zoom in on details and nuances according to the movements of eyes and attention.

Text authored by Anne Kølbæk Iversen.

Exhibition curated by Owen Paul Armour

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Mon-Aural is the latest exhibition series at Stereo Exchange, flipping the format to solo shows of emerging artists and late-career artists, juxtaposing past and future like a ball bouncing randomly on a linear timeline.

WHO - Niels Christensen (DK)
OPENING - 9th of June 17:00 - 20:00
ON VIEW - 9th of June 2023 until the 8th of July 2023
OPEN - Saturday the 10th of June 13 to 16 and then by appointment
CONTACT - @stereoexchangecph or youandme@stereoexchange.dk
WHERE - Mariendalsvej 52A, st.th, 2000 Frederiksberg, DK. See map

The exhibition opening hours could be subject to change due to unforeseen circumstances.
Supported by the Danish Arts Foundation, Frederiksberg Fonden & Ny Carlsbergfondets

Above Image:
Niels Christensen (DK)
Untitled (2023)
Speculative illustration of a person with the conditions of Anosognosia, Mirror Agnosia, and Mirror
Image Agnosia inside an MRI scanner.e map

@stereoexchangecph
#contemporaryart
#art
#artistrunspace
#projectspace

Supported by the Danish Arts Foundation, Frederiksberg Fonden & Ny Carlsbergfondets

Stereo Exchange

Mariendalsvej 52A, AT. 2
2000 Frederiksberg, DK.
See map

youandme@stereoexchange.dk

CVR: 39042096

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Supported by the Danish Arts Foundation, Frederiksberg Fonden &
Danmarks Nationalbanks Jubilæumsfond af 1968

Stereo Exchange is directed, curated and organised day to day, year by year by it’s Director, the artist Owen Paul Armour and the artist that collaborate with the gallery.

Stereo Exchange cycles back to life within a pandemic, we, of course, think about the surroundings and are led by our hearts and minds to see a place of and for positive change.

As an artist-run project space that predominantly shows international artists and designers work, we feel we must move for positive change with evermore inclusion, transparency, reflection and scrutiny.