Marie Thams

The Object is to Change the Soul

Heartland Festival, Egeskov Slotspark, DK

Heartland Temporary - The Object is to Change the Soul.

"Heartland Festival has this year invited curator Iben Bach Elmstrøm to compose an exhibition in Egeskov Castle’s Renaissance Gardens. The exhibition consists of works by four Danish contemporary artists: Ditte Gantriis, Lea Guldditte Hestelund, Marie Thams and Kirsten Astrup.

The exhibition The Object is to Change the Soul is concerned with how we seem to be controlled from the outside, while everything depends on how we control ourselves from within. Four Danish artists are invited to investigate today's seductive tales of individualism and the flourishing subject that is both in body and mind, in energetic transformation and self-development. The artists investigate how we today in Western culture cultivate identity through new forms of presentation and self-realization mechanisms through sculptural works, sound installations and performances. The Renaissance Garden around Egeskov Castle creates a unique scene for the exhibition, as the Renaissance culture’s basic philosophy was based on the cultivation of individualism and presents man as an extraordinary and self-contained creature.

Today, we often operate in different professional contexts, where internal self-management is a crucial quality parameter. We are self-working, self-motivating, and self-improving; we are our own experts, own employers and own entrepreneurs in the discipline of success. The self-production and identity of our time arise through new social exchanges, as well as through ideals and norms that arise as a result of the development of a career society. A rationality best expressed by the English Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: "The Economics are the method - the object is to change the soul," from which the exhibition partially borrows its title.

The exhibition is a survey of how individualism looks in our contemporary age. Despite Michel Foucault's declaration of the death the sovereign subject, Western urban individual subjectivity still flourishes both in body and mind. The individual is set above the collective, in the hunt to cultivate success, competition, and personal distinctiveness. The exhibition aims to give form to a power factor that seems to come from outside, but is imposed from within as psychically internalized desire."
– Iben Elmstrøm, curator

For more infomation:
http://www.heartlandfestival.dk/
http://www.agency.idoart.dk/