Javier Tapia
Friezes and Borders
24.08.23 – 22.10.23

2 June to 30 June 2023, Viborg Kunsthal in collaboration with Art Hub Copenhagen show Friezes and Borders by Javier Tapia, artist-in-residency at AHC Spring 2023.

The site-specific exhibition Friezes and Borders in the Staircase Gallery features two large collages by the Danish-Chilean artist Javier Tapia. The title is a reference both to the classical friezes and the contemporary allusions to the presence of mental, physical and historical borders in the works.

The fundamental theme of the works is the representation of the colonised subject. The collages juxtapose images from classical friezes featuring strong references to 15th- and 19th-century landscape painting with images representing parallel stories from parts of the world other than Europe, thereby expanding the representation of subjects.

Tapia’s works create an enhanced representation of the colonised body, thereby generating new references to the idea of ‘the other’ and challenging the more linear European conception of people, art and history. The confrontation between old and new and different ways of representing the world and the subject create a hybrid idea of the landscape that reflects contemporary art discourse, thereby helping create a new kind of representation.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Javier Tapia (b. Chile, 1976) lives and works in Copenhagen. Tapia’s work can be described as a chain of events in continuous expansion. Some aspects of his work comments on problems associated to geopolitics and the function of art in the local and global culture, where identity plays a central role. The use of video, photography, drawing and collage are complementary to each other in the construction of the works. The results are different installation outlooks, where social interaction and materiality are an open destination.