Twilight
22.5.26 - 27.6.26
Isaak Fangel is pleased to present the group exhibition Twilight with new and pre-existing works by Hanna Antonsson, Nicholas Marschner and Signe Ralkov. Each of the artists’ works engage with the genre of the uncanny, blurring the boundaries between animate and inanimate, human and non-human, life and death.
Popularized by Sigmund Freud in 1919, the term ‘unheimliche’, directly translates to ‘unhomely,’ but was later defined as ‘uncanny.’ It refers to something which is recognizable and familiar but through a process of repression has become alienated. The uncanny exemplifies a feeling of eeriness and uneasiness precisely because it contains something familiar and repulsive. It is an in-between state, like that of twilight.
Understood as a phenomenon, twilight is a transition between light and darkness. Used figuratively, it can also describe a time of transformation and the process of metamorphosis. Since its definition by Freud more than a hundred years ago, the uncanny has had a profound influence on all forms of art, laying the groundwork for countless movements and subgenres, like surrealism or abject art, that explores what is homely and familiar and what is not.
The uncanny has made it all the way to the 21st century in a world that seems just as eerie as it did back then. Ralkov, Antonsson and Marschner have grown up in a culture influenced by mass media reproductions of the uncanny. Similarly to Freud, artists today are spiraling like Lynchian characters trying to decipher what is real and what is not. After the onset of new technologies and feelings of alienation, artists work just as much within this framework as their predecessors.
Text by Nønne Christensen
Photo: Kevin Josias