Christian Falsnaes
White Box Exhibition
Masculine demeanor as a consequence of social power relations between artist and audience
10 | 09 – 30 | 11 | 2016
"Society is organised by instructions and orders. Normally we don’t recognise them. But when you create new rituals, especially in the art world, then suddenly these mechanisms become visible." (Christian Falsnaes, SEEK Magazine 2016)
In his performances the Danish artist Christian Falsnaes addresses his audience in an astonishingly direct way and through this, involves people in his performative process. Suddenly, playfully, visitors get involved in a situation which touches on issues of authority, group dynamics, social rituals, excitement and submission. In his White Box exhibition, as part of ZU artsprogram, Falsnaes showed his video installation ”Masculine demeanor as a consequence of social power relations between artist and audience”, an experiment with positions of power.
Over time Christian Falsnaes has attempted to develop strategies to make his artworks function without his physical presence, delegating, in very different ways, the execution of his performance. For example, the exhibition visitors for "Justified Beliefs" (2014) received headphones and – when they followed the instruction – they executed the performance. For the 13th ZU Sommerfest, students executed the performance "A good reason is one that looks like one“ and drew attention to gestures and affects.
Christian Falsnaes, *1980 in Kopenhagen, studied at the Kunstakademie Wien from 2005 to 2011. Since then he has become well known internationally with solo and group exhibitions: his performance "Formations of bodies – Opening” was presented at Kunst-Werke Berlin – KW Institute for Contemporary Art in 2013. His project "Many" was performed at the Juan & Patricia Vergez Collection in Buenos Aires in 2015. In the same year he was nominated for a prize by the Nationalgalerie Berlin and on this occasion his work was shown at the Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum for Contemporary Art - Berlin.