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GREY - ZONE - ZONE
The Museum of Contemporary Art / Roskilde / Denmark 1999
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The exhibition presents 5 installations which involve the spectators both physically and mentally, thus making them a part of these three-dimensional works. In one of them, Grey-Eye-Zone, 12 mechanical eyes search the room. Like floodlight projectors they lighten up in all directions, while slowly revolving on their axis. Eyes staring at us, but at the same time binding us if we try to look into them. A horror vision of a future robot-like man ?

Grey-Life-Zone is instead a sort of ’memory box’ cointaining a symphony of voices and images confronting the viewer with visual and verbal statements about death. From three video screens placed on coffinlike aluminium plates we meet nine artists from the Headlands Center for the Arts, near San Francisco, and hear about their personal relationship with death.

Real people in flesh and blood interviewed by B.v.H.H.S. during his three months long stay as artist-in-residence in 1998. In the other rooms, with the help of different media like photography, light, sound, water and oil, the artist challenges our beliefs and feelings with screams of unborn babies Grey-Curtain-Zone, pictures of human beings with sheepish features Grey-Clone-Zone and finally undisguised death in form of human skulls Grey-Drop-Zone. All under the eyes of african totems of fertility.


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Grey-Zone-Zone is thought provoking and engaging. The exhibition appears to have been made not to please its audience but to move consciousness with its cool forms and eerie perspectives.

- Politiken / Newspaper / Annette Brodersen -

* Gene technology, artificial insemination and cloning are issues that concern everybody today. The ethical concerns are with the rights of scientists to do as they please with our bodies. Naturally, these big issues of life, death and religion also consume our visual artists. Among those who make these issues most engaging is B.v.H.H.S. , who has taken up recent technology in a series of installations. Unlike artists who push documentary and intellectually clever statements, B.v.H.H.S. wields technology’s own resources to make art that, exceedingly conscious of its materials, strikes our senses in very direct ways.

- Extra Bladet / Newspaper / Tom Jørgensen -

* There are many levels to perception and B.v.H.H.S’s current exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, like all good art, has several. Spontaneous experiences stem from the artist’s unmatched ability to employ materials to great symbolic and visual effect. His primary moves have always involved contrasts: bright white and deep black, soft (soot, velvet, rubber, oil, live flames) and hard (bright polished metal), stereometric forms and artificial light. In the current exhibition, the artist switches to sandblasted aluminum, an exceptionally fragile and refined material that registers the slightest fingerprint. ‘It’s almost like a Japanese garden: a single footstep will betray you’.

- Information / Newspaper / Gertrud Købke Sutton -