Selected Writings

Andreas Albrectsen & Jakob Kolding Arnstedt, Östra Karup, 2024

Arnstedt, Östra Karup presents Selected Writings – an exhibition of new works by artists Andreas Albrectsen and Jakob Kolding. In dialogue, they represent two overlapping generations of conceptual art practices that share a similar approach to collaging existing images and reworking paper media into newfound visual narratives.

The exhibition dissects a hidden relationship between literature, Artificial Intelligence and human cognition. For this occasion, the artists will frame a conversation between two ongoing bodies of work that take their departures from appropriated book pages: Andreas Albrectsen’s Recaptures and Jakob Kolding’s Erasures. The exhibited works combine intimate paper collages and large charcoal drawings in stark visual contrast of scale and materiality. This opposition in size and expression complements one another, creating a reflective ‘reading’ space of the text-based works, where silence and intrusive thoughts meet.

In Recaptures, the words behind Albrectsen’s dusty charcoal drawings are CAPTCHA’s used on websites and social media platforms. Words lifted out of their original literary context and digitally appropriated by Google and Meta as ‘Completely Automated Public Touring tests to tell Humans and Computers Apart’. These randomly generated limericks, preventing robots from accessing websites, are given a new life and physicality as drawings and spam poems. It is an entropic journey from library books to the Big-tech industry and back to the paper medium again. The viewers can actively decipher or bypass the exhibited works without being questioned about their humanity.

In Erasures, Jakob Kolding cuts and splices pages from a carefully chosen selection of literary works. Poetical and political, this technique of erasure gives way to new texts that are literally open. The works are discreet and almost invisible from a distance, yet intimate and visually striking up close. The series on show here, Unreliable Narrators, feature stories by Nabokov, Poe, Ocampo and Priest that have in common a narrator that slowly reveals themself to be unreliable, thus echoing central ideas in play in the Erasures works—the authority of the narrator and language, the control of information—while simultaneously emphasizing the possibility of repurposing dominant narratives and instead inviting new readings.