GRADUATION 2023 / REASONABLE DOUBT

Graduation Show 2023 – Funen Art Academy
REASONABLE DOUBT
May 11 – June 22

Graduates: Sofie Brag, Line Elkjær Frandsen, Simon Ganshorn, Jonas Hollerup Helle, Josefine Boel Johannessen, Sabrina Lucia Morales, Jeppe Østergaard Munk, Gro Pechüle, Pernille Pedersen, Elina Bergmark Wiberg 

Opening May 11, 4-7 pm.
Exhibition period: May 11 – June 22, 2023
Funen Art Academy, Sculpture Hall
Opening Hours: Monday – Thursday 10 am – 3 pm. (holidays not included)

Reasonable Doubt is a celebration and presentation of ten artists who are now stepping into the art world with all that that entails, but it is also a manifestation of contemporary art and its unique approach to and interaction with the phenomena that surround us.

The title is partly an underlining of the unlearning, undisciplining and unfettering we must do as both creators and receivers of the messages of contemporary art, and partly an affirmation that doubt is warranted – that doubt is a rationale, a qualitative tool for understanding ourselves and our surroundings with more nuance and greater depth. Reasonable Doubt is thus an invitation to embrace art and reassess our assumptions, conceptions and so-called truths.

A sanctuary for doubt
In economics, politics, professional life and a culture rife with self-presentation and self-realisation, doubt is something that must be eradicated, rejected, suppressed. In contemporary art, the opposite applies. Here, we find a sanctuary for doubt.

‘The greater the artist, the greater the doubt; perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize,’ wrote art critic and art historian Robert Hughes in ‘Modernism’s Patriarch’ in Time Magazine, 10 June, 1996.

Artists are painstakingly trained to sow, cultivate and utilise doubt. A well-founded and deliberate doubt that can make us rethink something important, often something wholly existential. Doubt can prompt us to reflect more deeply on things we take for granted. This year’s graduation works create spaces and situations where doubt is an end in itself. Instead of arriving at clarity, at an answer, the works ask us to remain in doubt, where the abstract, complex, poetic and ambiguous also reside. When we are there, subject to the work’s activation of our senses and intellect, we become attentive, we reconsider our point of view and perceptions, and that is the entire premise for encountering contemporary art. Right there.

The significance of the trivial
The final works of these ten graduates are all the outcomes of long processes of copious and careful deliberation, through which a question is unfolded, materials and media challenged, and answers left outside the door – in the translation from digital to physical, in the exaltation of the trivial, in the quiet negotiation of conversation, in the harmony or dissonance between two people, in the memory of a line, in the encounter with a new intelligence, in consumption, in collapse, in decay, in our innermost darkness.

On the whole, the trivial is central to a cohort that has also been affected by Covid-19 and the upheaval of everyday life that the pandemic caused. Screen time, everyday routines, social media, the home, bodily observations, nature as a refuge, doomsday scenarios and a simmering desperation for closeness and freedom all flow like a current beneath their works.

One could term this ‘the rationale of doubt’; a neo-romanticism which in its confrontation with our abyss-denying growth-thinking and rigid, failed categories offers a new and liberating sensitivity that doesn’t rely on established structures, cultural codes and identities, but insists on the need for radical rethinking. Silence, loss of control, confusion, ecstasy, vulnerability and delusion are all potential offspring of this well-founded doubt. A doubt that will give new meaning to trivialities and basic human needs. But it requires faith in one’s own practice and artistic courage to grapple with and share this doubt. That is something this year’s graduates possess, and we should be grateful for it. It bodes well for a complex future where we take neither each other, art nor the world for granted.

The launch of the exhibition catalogue will take place on Thursday, June 8 at 2-4 pm.

Subsequently, Reasonale Doubt will be shown at SAK Kunstbygning in Svendborg in the period June 30 – August 20. Opening on June 30 at 2-4 pm.

LINK to press photos + work descriptions

Reasonable Doubt is curated in collaboration with curator and critic Matthias Hvass Borello. The exhibition is kindly supported by the Augustinus Foundation, the Toyota Foundation, 15. Juni Foundation, N.M. Knudsens Foundation and the Møller Foundation.

For further information about the exhibition contact Funen Art Academy at info@detfynskekunstakademi.dk / 6611 1288 or curator Matthias Hvass Borello at matthiasborello@gmail.com