Aarhus, Denmark, August 28 – November 8, 2009




Most people seem to agree that Queen Margrethe takes up a lot of room in the consciousness of the Danes. But it’s probably more surprising that a lot of women let themselves be directly inspired by her as they create their own identities. This inspiration forms the starting point for the exhibition Being a Queen by the Korean artist Kyungwoo Chun (b. 1969). During a lengthy stay in Denmark Kyungwoo Chun has been studying this cultural and historical phenomenon in an almost anthropological way. On the basis of photographic and filmic documentation material from interviews with people who in one way or another let themselves be inspired by the Queen, Kyungwoo Chun thematizes that a lot of Danes are concerned with the queen as a basic historical symbol.

For the exhibition Being a Queen Kyungwoo Chun has created a number of staged portraits of people who all believe to share an either physical or mental likeness with Queen Margrethe. The women are dressed in clothes that look like those of the queen – and this masquerade makes the persons’ mental fusing with the Queen a physically tangible and visible effect in the photographs. In these portraits photography’s ability to create identities becomes very marked. Moreover they have been taken with long shutter speeds depending on the age of the depicted person. The result is a series of blurry, fogged and enigmatic images that rather than confirming the assumed queen-identity reveal this as fleeting, unwieldy and fluid.

The same play with identity is also expressed in the filmed interviews presented at Being a Queen. Here the visitors get a nuanced glimpse of the kind of positive qualities possessed by the Queen that the various persons actively use in the creation of their own identity.

The exhibition is a collaboration between Galleri Image and the Aarhus Art Building.

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The Aarhus Art Building
J. M. Mørks Gade 13
DK-8000 Aarhus, Denmark
Tel: +45 86 20 60 50
Fax: +45 86 12 46 16
Email: info@aarhuskb.dk
www.aarhuskunstbygning.dk