Jesper Just became known some twenty years ago for videos in which tense psychological encounters lead to emotionally loaded scenes. What has happened, or was happening, is not quite clear.  No one of the characters is speaking, but there may be a song accompanying the situation or the characters may communicate by singing.

The chosen places of the films are different.  In the early work No Man Is an Island I (2002) the scene is a city park while its sequel is staged in an old-fashioned way decorated and somewhat seedy-looking bar.  In the first version, an older man is singing and dancing in the park attracting the attention of the passers-by and some of them remain to observe the situation. A little boy, however, gladly starts imitating the dance movements, while others curiously follow the unfolding scene.

The role of the place was crucial when Jesper Just represented Denmark in the Venice biennale 2013.  He studied in-depth the Danish biennale pavilion, both its spatial and material qualities, in order to build a scene where the viewers’ movements were choregraphed by the artist. He has commented that the idea for these routes was often based on the model of the traditional English garden with its changing spaces and situations. The route of the spectator becomes part of the total experience and thus also of the entire work.  One of the main ideas of his installations is the transformation of a passive onlooker into an active participant.

Exhibition space presents a continuous challenge and inspiration. Jesper Just organizes and designs an installation into a set for the performance to be staged therein. This includes the choreography that guides the viewers’ way of engaging in the scene. 

The exhibition space is a stage for the performers, a scene that also shapes the viewers’ experience while it also serves as backdrop for the films/ LED sculptures on view. A specific aspect here is the hybridization of the functions and roles of both the public and the performers, both in live situations and as documented in film while the stage/scene is either a static setting or undergoing continuous modulations.  

Jesper Just is very aware of the emotional imagery of traditional moving pictures which he utilises in a conscious manner while also adapting them to the rhythms and goals of his own artistic work. A particular kind of passive melancholy haunts also the scene with LED sculptures in the installation Corporealités (2020).  The work tells how ballet dancers trained to the extreme use electric impulses to strengthen or re-train their weakened or injured muscles.

Jesper Just describes the work as follows:

“In Corporealités we see dancers standing, sitting, or lying on the floor. All the dancers are connected to one another in a circuit: hand to foot, head to toe, hand to hand. Through an electronic muscle stimulation system (EMS), electrical impulses are sent via electrodes into the dancers’ muscles.  The targeted muscles react by contracting. The bodies do not dance here, they are being danced.  It is a depersonalized circuit with no defined sender.

The music played is Gabriel Faure’s Pavane and it is both the soundtrack while also an active presence.

The music is romantic. In a ballet performance, the dancers would have expressed it by their bodies following the choreography. Now, there is a shift in emotions; sensitivity is appearing somewhere else. Thus, displacement is an overall theme in the work.”

Jesper Just’s recent installations “explore ideas of agency, performativity, and interpassivity”. The term interpassivity was defined by Robert Phaller and Slavoj Žižek in the 1990s.   He has told of the role of the concept in his work: “… it is basically delegating emotions and feelings, having other people experiencing your emotions on your behalf.” *)

The wordless atmosphere in this film seems to reflect a kind of collective state devoid of illusions and imbued by a feeling of contemporaneous melancholy. The work is reverberating the awkward imperfections of life as encountered even among the ballet dancers trained to perfection.

A repeating theme in Anne-Karin Furunes’ art is that of the female character victim to historic events beyond her control.  She uses different archives to search for pictures that move her.  These small photographs, originally taken for bureaucratic purposes, are enlarged into paintings often over two metres in height. She tells us that she often goes to an archive with a specific theme in mind, but then finds something unexpected and surprising which has been classified as marginal and without proper identification in the archive world.

What she discovers in the archives are the human beings behind the historical destinies that they have been subjected to. These documentary photographs have often been taken under extreme conditions: Jews due to be deported to Nazi Germany, victims of eugenics when it was still carried out in Sweden, criminals in prisons.

In 2014 Anne-Karin Furunes had an exhibition at the Palazzo Fortuny where she presented large-scale portraits of women who had worked at the palace studio of theatre and fashion designer Mariano Fortuny. She has also made a series of pictures in aluminium of former patients from the San Servolo psychiatric hospital, nowadays a museum in Venice.  These were exhibited in situ in the beautiful park surrounding the institute.

The faces in Furunes’ portraits have usually been stripped of all the attributes that would reveal their historical time and social position. The faces are naked; we see serious and worried gazes, likely unaware of the atrocities that they are doomed to undergo. And yet, through Furunes’ skilful technique, the paintings manage to reveal something of their historical time and social position but also of their personalities.

The technique that Anne-Karin Furunes uses is based on piercing holes of various sizes into canvas or paper by hand. When producing work to be exhibited outdoors, she uses aluminium plates and creates the holes with a machine. The canvas is usually soaked in black paint, and the picture emerges from the grid that the pierced holes create by letting light shine through in varying degrees depending on the sizes of the holes. She has developed this technique for about three decades and today masters it to the minutest detail.

The result creates an optical effect that changes according to the lighting conditions of the exhibition space as well as the movements of the onlooker. The picture becomes an event, a moment of communication between the eyes of the portrayed person and the viewer. The layers of historical events disappear as we face the gaze of another human being.