We are proud to announce the group exhibition Feel first, think later, opened on 6 March, between 17:00 – 20:00.

This group exhibition brings together three young artists at the beginning of their careers with one of the gallery’s most established artists in a dialogue about how we approach works of art. The title of the exhibition is derived from a quote by Sally von Rosen on how she would like her works to be perceived – letting the intuitive meeting with an artwork precede the intellectual interpretation of it. Annika Elisabeth von Hausswolff’s The Blind Woman from 1998, depicting a woman being led by her guide dog in the night down a brightly lit staircase, takes on the role of a symbolic portal into the discussion on that act of letting go and trusting that both one’s intuition and senses leads one in the right direction.

Without wishing to force the different artistic practices into a shared narrative, there are still elements in their work which can be seen as unifying. In the respective practices of Dhunsi, Ngọc Nguyễn and von Rosen there is a sense of tension, an almost push-pull movement, in the way their work goes against preconceived notion within their genres or the way in which they approach their subject-matter. Their work can also be said to vibrate in an “in-between”-state, never caught in a static place, but rather in a state of flow or development. Writing about his work Ocean smile, Dhunsi points to the “space between permanence and dissolution” in which it exists – both in the way it addresses questions about the layered and performed aspects of identity, but also in its materiality. Textiles are a recurring material in his practice, and by allowing the material its movement and breath, his works seek to resist the rigid authority of the photographic frame.

Sally von Rosen’s hybrid creatures – often found balancing on their sharp-clawed feet, staggering forward but appearing somehow lost in their sense of direction - evoke contrasting feelings of tenderness, brutality, longing and violence. Interconnectedness, and the longing for it, is a recurring theme. Von Rosen is concerned with the power that objects can exert on people and their social interactions, and by considering the material as a vessel capable of transferring emotion, it upends the idea of material as purely static and dissolves the subject-object distinction between the sculpture and its viewer. A push-pull movement is present in her work: both in the physically taxing process of bringing the sculptures to life, but also in the sculpture’s relation to one another. Often originating as one piece, von Rosen saws the bodies apart and thus creating two pieces stuck in an everlasting search for the missing half.

This push-pull tension can also manifest in the artist’s subject-matter. Dhunsi’s practice resists the static nature of photography, and his works are situated in the intersection of photography, textiles and installation. He also takes interest in photography’s role in shaping and controlling vision. This interest in how images shape vison and how it can resist preconceived notions and stereotypes is also present in Ngọc Nguyễn’s practice, which deconstructs and examines an iconography derived from the South-East Asian cultural sphere, fused with visual tendencies and memes from the internet. Both artists are anchored in dual cultures – Dhunsi with an Indian-Norwegian background, and Ngọc Nguyễn being a first-generation Danish individual of the Vietnamese diaspora - which is often reflected in their work.

Utilizing the semiotics of the brightly lit and highly stylized commercial photography, Ngọc Nguyễn explores dichotomies and how culturally charged objects can be interpreted. In this exhibition a block of tofu, which is associated with both joy and prosperity, is fused with a kitschy, Y2K, internet aesthetics in a surrealistic still life. In his Plain Dealing, a hand is seen gently clutching a model-hand, both bound together by a so called “Chinese finger trap” – a toy which functions so that the more both parts try to pull away from each other, the stronger the hold of the finger trap gets. This exploration of tension in and between objects, is also present in the adjacently installed work Final squeeze. The red pomelo, a fruit he often ate during his upbringing, is here tied up in a rubber band with its juices flowing out as the fruit is about to burst. As Ngọc Nguyễn describes his interpretation of the exhibition title, he sees it as an invitation to give way to impulses, thus letting go and letting intuition take hold instead.