Abstracta
2007–2019
Found materials (metal, glass, wood)
Dimensions variable
Kasper Akhøj (1976) works primarily with sculpture, film and photography. He explores objects, situations and residual histories of art, design and architecture, and the institutions that present them. In 2018, together with the Brazilian artist Tamar Guimarães, he won the Faena Prize for the Arts. He now lives and works in both Copenhagen and Athens.
The installation Abstracta, a work in progress since 2007, refers to a modular display system designed by the Danish architect Poul Cadovius. Produced in Denmark on an industrial scale for only a brief period in the 1960s, Cadovius’ system went on to live a life of its own beyond the control of its maker – first in China, in the form of a copied version, and then in Yugoslavia, where it was produced on an even larger scale in the 1970s. Cadovius was a furniture maker and engineer mostly known for creating the Royal System, a wall-hung shelving system designed in the 1940s for concrete homes and the organization of modern life.
In this project, Akhøj goes on a journey backwards in time, starting in the present-day scrapyards of post-communist Yugoslavia (from Macedonia and Montenegro in the south, through Kosovo, Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia to Slovenia in the north), where he first encountered the system, and going on to follow a semi-circumnavigational route around the world, revealing a surprising tale in the process. The journey concludes where it started, in the high-spirited market for mid-century Scandinavian modernist design. In the course of the journey, he sheds light on production processes taking place both inside and outside modern capitalism.