Kristian Kragelund’s latest exhibition at Bjorn & Gundorph Gallery, in Denmark, showcases a new body of works created since the start of the global pandemic.

Installation shot of Kristian Kragelund’s Untitled_CellF1, 2020. Image courtesy of the Artist.

Kragelund’s analytic approach to art making offers a poignant insight into the current state of our planet. Exploring the futility of objects and incorporating the use of industrial materials, ‘A Terminal Posture’ takes on the weight of what Kragelund believes to be some of the driving forces in our present and future worlds.

Installation shot of Kristian Kragelund’s Untitled_Artefact_x, 2020. Image courtesy of the Artist.

Kragelund interprets fragments of urbanisation in new and novel ways: as essential objects and artefacts of human history. Untitled_Artefact_x, 2020 is composed from a range of discarded full-size silicone discs, which had been rejected by a manufacturer in Silicon Valley. This is both a comment on the act of recycling, and on the dominance of the West Coast’s technological production. 

Central to the show is Kragelund’s interrogation of the term ‘artefact’. Taken from its more natural affiliation with the fields of anthropology and ethnology, Kragelund instead looks at how art objects can have the role of cultural medium, able to reveal different methodologies, truths and systems.

Installation view of Kristian Kragelund’s Algopolis, 2020. Image courtesy of the Artist. 

Algopolis, 2020 is a model cityscape made from CPUs, the main controlling circuitry within computers. Kragelund interprets them as similar to modernist architecture – therefore exposing the links between human and machine thinking around design and spatiality.

Installation shot of ‘A Terminal Posture’. Image courtesy of the Artist.

This work ties into the exhibition essay, which declares that we are currently living in the age of ‘The Algopocene’, where man is the dominant influence on the environment. The term ‘Algo’ carries the double meaning of being both the abbreviation used in a variety of coding languages for algorithm, as well as álgos being the greek word for ‘pain’, and therefore associated with anxiety.⁣

Detail of Kristian Kragelund’s Algopolis, 2020. Image courtesy of Bjorn & Gundorph.

As the exhibition essay’s title (‘The Age of Anxiety’) indicates, Kragelund tackles taboos surrounding our perpetual state of unease during the pandemic, describing it as being “amplified by a relentless image culture that indirectly lends shapes and forms to more immediate fears”.

‘A Terminal Posture’ wholly characterises the new impulse driving Kragelund’s multilayered artistic vision. It discloses the extent of his sensibility and awareness of the changing world which can be explored through “explicitly concrete” terms and through the power of objects.

Kristian Kragelund’s ‘A Terminal Posture’, is on at Bjorn & Gundorph until 17th October. View the gallery’s exhibition page here.