A collaboration by HEBIINU/ Helle Vibeke Jensen & WEDNESDAY ARCHITECTURE

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Materials: Maple wood, indigo ink, printed paper, bookbinding linen, string, glass tube, LED light, spikes from African porcupine and horsehair.

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The installation ‘Foam Of The Days, Library For 1 Book’ is revolving around one book; (L'écume des Jours, 1947) by the French author Boris Vian;

A surreal novel about love, talking mice, and a man who ages years in a week. All concerning the disastrous and beautiful plot of an illness caused by an internally growing water lily.

Helle Vibeke Jensen has made 68 books – one for each chapter in Boris Vian’s book. Colours, shapes and figures are gathered from Vian’s novel that circles about the love of books, people, food and life.

But Helle Vibeke Jensen has mixed her own life into to piece and added new layers to Vian’s already labyrinthine story, where well-known phenomena and objects are poetically displaced and distorted. This means it is wholly in the spirit of the book that a calf-roulade from the book is transformed to the cushion of the ‘strange’ self-circulating stool called Colin. Wednesday Architecture has designed the library furniture: Surreal furniture, taking from the universe of Vian’s novel but at the same time, contemporary. In this universe furniture and space reacts humanly animated. The sun seases to set and her bedroom shrinks as the beautiful Chloé sickens due to the water lily that grows in her breast. Chloé is illustrated as the table entangled in - and over taken by the beautiful but deathly water lily. The whiskered book-wagon ‘Chick’ carries a fine collection of un-written books, though he is destined to de-route and crash because of his crooked wheel’s tendencies.

Foam of the Days whirls the reader  round and round in a hunt for life, passion and love in a slippery slope of ups and downs.

The piece brings together past and present with fiction and physical ‘reality’ in a subtle manner.

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Exhibited at the He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen, China; SCENES UNSEEN IN THE SUBTROPICS. From the 1th. of Dec - the 3th. of march 2018-19.

Curated by Erlend Høyersten/Aros

 

‘Foam Of The Days - Library for 1 book’ has received an honorary award by the Danish Arts Foundation in 2017.

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