In a few weeks, Kunsthal Charlottenborg will welcome visitors to a solo show featuring Danish artist Honey Biba Beckerlee. The exhibition Digital Matters examines connections and entanglements across the realms of geology, technology and biology, mapping the movement of elements from nature into the computer and further on into the human body. This year, Biba Beckerlee received a three-year work grant from the Danish Arts Foundation.
Press view: 12 October at 11.00–12.00
Official opening: 12 October at 17.00–20.00
Exhibition run: 13 October 2022 – 19 February 2023
The digital industry encompasses a vast production apparatus of raw material extraction, global distribution and the disposal of gigantic amounts of waste. Our current time period, the information age, is based on the idea of unlimited intangible growth. But what we cannot immediately see nevertheless takes on physical form as gigantic internet server farms, whose total CO2 emissions are greater than those of the airline industry. This has and will have absolutely decisive physical consequences for ourselves and the ecosystems of which we are part.
This perspective prompts many questions: What happens to the elements and alloys after they end up in landfills? What forms can and will they take? How should we live with the waste generated by our technologies? How will it live on in us and with us?
Honey Biba Beckerlee examines connections across the realms of geology, technology and biology, linking the destinies of humans and the planet. She works with the patterns that form the fundamental structures for life and thinking on geological, atomic and organic levels.
In the exhibition Digital Matters, technologies are made sensuous and tangible, spun into forms and narratives which take their point of departure in the earth, materiality and body from which technologies spring from and which they actively affect. Through weavings, the work Cu in Circuit investigates the relationship between time, memory and copper, which plays an absolutely crucial role in computer technologies. For the work series Matter, mother, matrix, Beckerlee has processed waste products from a silicon factory to make ceramics. Swarming/Swimming is a work woven out of seaweed and optical fibres, referencing the submarine internet cables which form the physical infrastructure for the digital era’s vast information cloud.
In 2017, Honey Biba Beckerlee received the Novo Nordisk Foundation Mads Øvlisen PhD scholarship in practice-based research; she is currently completing her practice-based PhD at Aarhus University and the Royal Danish Academy of Arts, Copenhagen. The research project Digital Matters aims to rethink current notions about immateriality in digital technology through an artistic practice. In 2022, she received the Danish Arts Foundation’s three-year work grant.
Based on the artist’s Ph.D. research the exhibition will be accompanied by an artist talk on 2 November at 17.00-18.30 and a series of workshops focusing on materials and techniques from the exhibition.
The exhibition is supported by the Augustinus Foundation, Beckett Foundation, the Danish Art Workshops (SVFK), Dreyers Foundation, Grosserer L. F. Foght’s Foundation, Novo Nordisk Foundation, Obel Family Foundation, the Danish Arts Council, William Demant Foundation. Sponsored by JD-Contractor A/S, Roblon, Topsil.
