Kunstmuseum Brandts, Copenhagen
19 September - 02 May 2027
In September, Kunstmuseum Brandts will open a major solo exhibition of the Canadian artist Tau Lewis for the first time in Scandinavia. The exhibition, which is the artist's largest to date, is created in collaboration with the Tramway art gallery in Glasgow and the Performa Biennale in New York, and it is part of the museum's increased focus on international collaborations.
With metres of old strips of fabric, skins, shells and other found things, Tau Lewis processes the great existential narratives in which we reflect ourselves and our surroundings. With recycled materials, she intertwines current topics such as sustainability, the climate crisis, the survival of species and cohesion with spirituality, cultural roots and a showdown with past hierarchies in both art and world history.
For Tau Lewis, each of the recycled materials contains energies and narratives, which through working with them are connected to the present. When she insists on doing the slow needlework on the works herself, it has roots in her Jamaican and social origins. At the same time, the time-consuming and repetitive work becomes a countermeasure to the high pace of the performance society and the desire for growth. A quiet protest, but also a gentle nudge in a new direction, where the repetitive and the collective layers from previous owners and generations' work are allowed to take up space. Here, sustainability in the broadest sense also includes time, care, contemplation and cohesion.
The large tapestries, wall-hung masks and human-high sculptures contain stories about displaced peoples and people living without a homeland, but also other stories that have often been omitted from art history. Where architecture, sculpture and oil painting were previously considered the "real art", several contemporary artists deliberately use the softer and more feminine materials and work processes to remind us of something we have overlooked. Tau Lewis expands the perspective to include forgotten myths and ritual practices that remind us of a universal human spirituality, which contains the possibility of feeling that we are all rooted in the same world across time, geography, religion and culture.
At Kunstmuseum Brandts, you enter an enveloping total installation of spirits and gods, textural narratives and textural narratives, and where several of the works are created specifically for the exhibition in Odense, and are tied together by a soundscape created in collaboration with composer and musician Lyra Pramuk. All the works in the exhibition are linked to the myth of the Sumerian goddess Inana, one of the oldest recorded stories we know, from around 2300 years BC.