Katja Bjørn. Video art
January 21 – December 31, 2018
Katja Bjørn
Video art
In connection with the J.L. Jensen exhibition ‘A scent of eternity’, the Nivaagaard Collection features an outdoor installation by the Danish artist Katja Bjørn. Her video work is inspired by the museum’s newly acquired still life painting of J.L. Jensen, Pomegranates and green and blue grapes on a marble frame, 1833. The video is displayed on a screen that has been submerged into the lawn in front of the museum. The viewer’s gaze is therefore directed down into the ground, a place of incipient growth and nourishment, but also a place of darkness, death and burial.
In the film, which alternates between real footage and animation, we see fruits, flowers and bodies that start out bursting with life, but slowly descend into rot and decay until they finally disappear altogether; things of beauty, constantly moving between emergence and decay, virginity and deflowering.