Tue Greenfort: Garbage Bay
SculptureCenter, 44-19 Purves Street, Long Island City, New York, 11101
10 November 2013 - 27 January 2014
From the Press Release
SculptureCenter is presenting the first US solo exhibition of Danish artist Tue Greenfort, whose interdisciplinary practice deals with the overlap of public and private realms, natural and cultural history. Commissioned through SculptureCenter’s Artist-in-Residence program, Greenfort is in the process of producing a new body of work that considers art’s role in reaffirming and dismantling assumptions about nature and the environment.
Through extensive research, discussions with experts, artists and environmentalists, the exhibition and artwork presented examine the site of Jamaica Bay, a marshland that spans the outer boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens in New York City. Greenfort’s exhibition and the discussions hosted around it will seek to uncover parallels and contextualize relationships between art, ecology, and politics, using the actualities of the specific site of Jamaica Bay, as well as its broader implications.
By focusing on the site of Jamaica Bay, the exhibition charts an exploration of wetlands, while examining the specific role of the marshland within the water systems of New York. Although they are significant ecosystems, wetlands such as swamps and marshes have a limited recreational function for humans; in fact they can often be inhospitable, a quality that affects their visibility and popularity. While swamps and marshes serve humans, as well as the multitudes of other species they support, they are often the dumping ground for waste and at environmental risk. Questioning the role of human desire and pleasure seeking in forming ideas of nature, as well as directing larger ecological concern and attention; the exhibition accounts for the conflicting interests that drive understandings of natural environments. Greenfort’s exhibition looks at the inherent contradictions following perceptions that some types of ‘nature’ are more significant than others.
Tue Greenfort interweaves the ideas of public and private and nature and culture with the language of contemporary art to formulate a critique of current economical and scientific production practices. Fascinated by the dynamics in the natural world, Greenfort’s work often revolves around ecology and its history, including the environment, social relations, and human subjectivity.
Tue Greenfort was born in 1973 in Holbaek, Denmark and lives and works in Berlin where he is represented by Johann König. As a participant in dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel, Greenfort was co-curator of an archive on multi-species co-evolution, The Worldly House. He has had extensive solo presentations at Berlinische Galerie (2012), South London Gallery (2011), Kunstverein Braunschweig (2008) and Secession, Vienna (2007). Greenfort has participated in numerous international exhibitions at institutions including Kunstverein Hannover (2011), Royal Academy of Arts, London (2009), Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2009), the Fondazione Morra Greco, Naples (2008), Skulptur Projekte Münster (2007) and Witte de With, Rotterdam (2006). His publications include Photosynthesis, Sternberg Press, 2006, and Linear Deflection, Walter König, 2009.
