Henrik Plenge Jakobsen

Circus Pentium is installation art; an exhibition that combines sculpture, video, and performance to form a single, large-scale installation.

In Circus Pentium we meet objects such as a striped circus tent, an empty flying trapeze, and an imposing ring. All of them things we recognise from the world of circus. The circus is the prototype of the modern entertainment industry; a place of illusions, sensations, and transformations, for thrilling delights and silly capers. But also a place where all clowning can at any time take on aspects of existentialist gravity and tragedy. Circus Pentium is a circus that has gone off the rails. It is a cacophonic universe which does not present a single truth, a single interpretation of reality. We cannot seek and find a single, final meaning, but are forced to resign ourselves to being able to pursue several different roads branching off each other into the unknown.

From time to time, the space is peopled by performers and animals. Partly through the exhibition videos, and partly when the exhibition acts as the backdrop of the Circus Pentium opera. The characters include Frau Emmy von N, an incarnation of one of Sigmund Freud's hysterical women; the great illusionist Napoleon; and Theodor Wiesengrund, a schizophrenic character who oscillates between being a banker in the world's largest bank and being the German philosopher Theodor Adorno.

With these characters, Henrik Plenge Jakobsen refers to the realms of psychoanalysis, power, Capital, and philosophy, but they are merely a few examples. The exhibition's complexity grows even greater with the other characters and objects that pick up threads from every corner of European civilisation. The unifying force - for better or worse – appears to be the Pentium; the brain of the digital world.

Henrik Plenge Jakobsen Born in 1967 in Copenhagen. Studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Institut des Hautes Etudes en Art Plastique, and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris. Plenge Jakobsen has caused quite a stir with his controversial installation art over the years, often offering a critique of the social space in which we operate. Since the mid-1990s, he has enjoyed great international attention, exhibiting his work at numerous venues abroad. The x-rummet project represents his first large-scale solo exhibition at a Danish museum.

Opera For the x-rummet exhibition, Henrik Plenge Jakobsen has co-operated with Goodiepal and Dan Marmorstein to create the opera Circus Pentium. The opera was performed for the very first time at the opening of the exhibition and a video recording is screened at the exhibition venue.

Catalogue Statens Museum for Kunst has published a catalogue which include interview with the artist and the opera behind the exhibition. The catalogue can be purchased in the museum art bookshop.

Pressetext

Henrik Plenge Jakobsen: Circus Pentium