Street life - What's in a name?
The Illums Bolighus store in Copenhagen serves as a kind of showroom for the hottest items in Danish and Scandinavian design. It's the kind of place that makes you want to work harder and make more money...Yes, money - the very reason I have come to...
The Illums Bolighus store in Copenhagen serves as a kind of showroom for the hottest items in Danish and Scandinavian design. It's the kind of place that makes you want to work harder and make more money...
Yes, money - the very reason I have come to this store, but I haven't come here to shop, oh no my droogs, I have come here to look at some photographs that are hanging on the walls above and between the furniture, a series of stark, yet serene portraits staring straight at you. They do not ask for sympathy or compassion, the faces are almost blank, asking only that you look right back at them.
Each portrait is for sale at 52,000 Danish Krøner (all scrooges divide by 17). This hefty sum summons up the first of many questions that I should like to ask Kristian Von Hornsleth, the artist. I wonder, Herr Von Hornsleth, will the money from the sales of these pictures go back to men and women who have become part of the Hornsleth Village Uganda Project?
As I stand before each portrait I wonder what it would take for me to change my name, or rather add to it. On the one hand, my name is extremely important to me, I am attached to it, I say it in a way that makes it mine, in a sense, I own it. On the other hand, what's in a name - pah!
What Herr Von Hornsleth has done is remarkable. Firstly, I should introduce him to you as a Danish artist, whose name I first heard in November 2006. In short, Herr Von Hornsleth had gone to Uganda and made a free trade deal with 100 people in a small village. The deal was that the villagers all add the name "Hornsleth" to theirs in exchange for household animals. So far a total of 300 animals have been traded with 300 families.
These pictures, hanging on the refined walls for just a few days, are the latest chapter in this story.
I try to get in touch with the artist but he is on his way to an art fair in Austria. Instead, I am instructed to ask for a book in the store, which I will not pay for. I pick up the book and cycle home to look at the pictures and read more, particularly about the controversial aftermath.
Many do not feel comfortable with this project; local pride, sceptics, hypocrites and the guilty are just some of the subcategories. Misinformation could be another. I read in the book that the media in Kigali talk of a "latent humiliation" that Herr Von Hornsleth is causing Ugandans in general; have the villagers' souls been sold for a goat?
Let's stop right here now and applaud, for the genius of this project is the humour it knew it would generate. You must laugh at this project for it is full of joy, the faces in the portraits are grand and beautiful. The project has a dynamic of powerful truth which so many works of art lack. The truth of a Rembrandt stroke, the truth of a project with this slogan: We want to help you, but we want to own you. It is at once so solemn, so touching and such fun, and yes it makes you feel uncomfortable in your saturated cosiness.
Did Hornsleth really have to go to the trouble? Could he not have pretended to change the names? Would this not have been less dramatic? Well, yes to the first question and no and no again to the other two. Every question one begins to ask about this project answers itself. It is a self-explanatory work of art that has got us thinking and some of us confused.
But I still do not know where the money for the portraits will go? And, of course, as a westernised human watchdog, it is but my duty to ask, is it not?
Yes, money - the very reason I have come to this store, but I haven't come here to shop, oh no my droogs, I have come here to look at some photographs that are hanging on the walls above and between the furniture, a series of stark, yet serene portraits staring straight at you. They do not ask for sympathy or compassion, the faces are almost blank, asking only that you look right back at them.
Each portrait is for sale at 52,000 Danish Krøner (all scrooges divide by 17). This hefty sum summons up the first of many questions that I should like to ask Kristian Von Hornsleth, the artist. I wonder, Herr Von Hornsleth, will the money from the sales of these pictures go back to men and women who have become part of the Hornsleth Village Uganda Project?
As I stand before each portrait I wonder what it would take for me to change my name, or rather add to it. On the one hand, my name is extremely important to me, I am attached to it, I say it in a way that makes it mine, in a sense, I own it. On the other hand, what's in a name - pah!
What Herr Von Hornsleth has done is remarkable. Firstly, I should introduce him to you as a Danish artist, whose name I first heard in November 2006. In short, Herr Von Hornsleth had gone to Uganda and made a free trade deal with 100 people in a small village. The deal was that the villagers all add the name "Hornsleth" to theirs in exchange for household animals. So far a total of 300 animals have been traded with 300 families.
These pictures, hanging on the refined walls for just a few days, are the latest chapter in this story.
I try to get in touch with the artist but he is on his way to an art fair in Austria. Instead, I am instructed to ask for a book in the store, which I will not pay for. I pick up the book and cycle home to look at the pictures and read more, particularly about the controversial aftermath.
Many do not feel comfortable with this project; local pride, sceptics, hypocrites and the guilty are just some of the subcategories. Misinformation could be another. I read in the book that the media in Kigali talk of a "latent humiliation" that Herr Von Hornsleth is causing Ugandans in general; have the villagers' souls been sold for a goat?
Let's stop right here now and applaud, for the genius of this project is the humour it knew it would generate. You must laugh at this project for it is full of joy, the faces in the portraits are grand and beautiful. The project has a dynamic of powerful truth which so many works of art lack. The truth of a Rembrandt stroke, the truth of a project with this slogan: We want to help you, but we want to own you. It is at once so solemn, so touching and such fun, and yes it makes you feel uncomfortable in your saturated cosiness.
Did Hornsleth really have to go to the trouble? Could he not have pretended to change the names? Would this not have been less dramatic? Well, yes to the first question and no and no again to the other two. Every question one begins to ask about this project answers itself. It is a self-explanatory work of art that has got us thinking and some of us confused.
But I still do not know where the money for the portraits will go? And, of course, as a westernised human watchdog, it is but my duty to ask, is it not?