Alina Rentsch & Danae Valenza: The direction from which the clouds come
July 2021
Alina Rentsch & Danae Valenza:
The direction from which the clouds come
opening Monday july 5 at 9am
Kl. 9 is an exhibition space in a window display located in the pedestrian tunnel under Birger Jarlsgatan, leading to Östermalmtorg metro station in Stockholm.
UV lights run on a timer, attempting to bring some weather underground and intermittently revealing an assembled text from the international cloud atlas. Placed in this context to describe the movements of people in the passageways of The tunnelbana station.
Whenever one tries to look at clouds as things, one becomes aware of their dissolving, rapidly disappearing character. This ontological strangeness of the cloud as a veiled half-thing appears only fleetingly, yet is fixed in a molecular structure. In this context, it is positioned as a tool for the observation and description of rhythmic formations in public spaces. In the 19th century, early scientific methods tried to classify, describe, and order these transient bodies, summarized in encyclopedias such as the International Cloud Atlas. By extracting poetic moments of this instructive text, alternative meanings are created, becoming reflective of the site itself. The gesture is amplified with the use of UV light, brought underground. Natural phenomena are superimposed onto the syncopation of collective space. Here, the cloud is a metaphor for an aesthetic of fleetingness in the tension between appearance and disappearance - infrastructures that are remarkably similar to the continuous movements within a public passageway.
Alina Rentsch graduated with her BFA at Weißensee Academy of Art in Berlin and is currently studying Fine Arts in the Master’s programme at Konstfack University in Stockholm. Working mainly with language, communication processes and structures of response, she is interested in questions surrounding the distribution of text and the role of the reader.
Danae Valenza’s practice unites musicality and image, often departing from linguistic, social or cultural references embedded in sites and materials. She holds a BFA from Monash University in Melbourne, an MFA from Konstfack University and has completed a Post Master Of Public Interest at The Royal Art Academy, both in Stockholm.
