A cast of newly commissioned, disobedient automata inhabits the ground floor of Kunsthall Trondheim: articulated skeletal bodies in stainless steel, moved by their own motors. Their design derives from medieval torture devices and stage machinery of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Each has tendons and limbs and walks with a halting gait along its own spine: a track climbing the walls or crossing the floor. Their choreographies run on different time scales, layered so the performance never repeats. Joints creak; limbs strike. As tension pulls and releases, the motion conducts a requiem over this percussion: glottal stops, groans, and other wordless extended vocal techniques performed and recorded by the artist and processed live.
Beyond its machinery, Andriessen's installation draws on the methods of public dehumanization. The body appears here as a site of discipline, reproduction, trauma, and extraction. At stake is its disposability: bodies can be used, depleted, abandoned, or destroyed. The persecuted, historically and today, have been named vermin, polluting bodies made available for purification and violence. This slur is the first source of the automata's anatomy: forms that scuttle and climb.
Barren, a term long applied to women and to land, names this condition of withheld and exploited generation. Reproduction, then, is not simply biology, but something governed by the demand to produce. THE BARREN also presents a site of resistance. A resilient, hybrid form continues: scarred, exhausted, lamenting what is inflicted on it. But these bodies persist. They adapt to a hostile environment by turning the act of carrying on into refusal. As their motion and mourning increasingly affect the space they inhabit, the sculptures move in concert: individual acts of tension and release accumulate into a shared composition, an opera in which materials and bodies work together in an ongoing play of collapse and recovery.
Curated by Adam Kleinman & Joe Rowley
Thanks & Credits:
The artist warmly thanks: Tom Bekkers, Guillermo Cárdenas Gutiérrez, Aleksy Domke, Tild Green, Oscar Lemerle, Bastiaan Mobach, Nathan Pottier, and Andreas Tegnander.
Kunsthall Trondheim is grateful to Maria Ammentorp, Noah Brännström, Annika Svendsen Finne, Mickis Gullstrand, Ula Jern, Marc Pricop, Cas van Son, and the entire Kunsthall Team.
This exhibition is supported by Mondriaanfonds, Kulturdirektoratet, Stichting Niemeijer Fonds, Stichting Stokroos, Cultuurfonds, and Gilles Hondius Foundation.