WIND
Kåre Frang
11.10.24 - 02.11.24
WIND is a remake of Kåre Frang’s 2016 video Air (VW Golf III), which featured a car being dropped repeatedly froma crane in a junkyard. The video was edited so that the lifting and dropping of the car was omitted - we only see thecar hitting the ground over and over again, slowly breaking apart until it’s just a pile of metal, glass, and plastic. Itlooks like the car is bouncing itself to pieces.
While that work was set in a junkyard - a cemetery for cars - WIND takes place on a public street in Copenhagen.Once again, the film consists of repetitive shots of the vehicle hitting the pavement and breaking apart in lusciousslow motion. Even though the action is violent, the slow motion makes the car’s movements appear strangely gen-tle, almost like the rhythm of breathing. Bits of the metal fly through the air and roll down the street with an eeriecalm and languor.
Pedestrians pass by while this is happening, seemingly oblivious or uninterested. The everyday life of the streetcontinues, as if the car’s destruction were unremarkable. The Foley soundscape highlights the uncanny discrep-ancy between the ordinary real-time motion of the pedestrians and the dramatic slow motion of the car. Frang’saim is to “place the viewer between two different experiences of time.”
A car is a private space that barrels through public space. It is an insular world in which people have intimatethoughts and conversations while they move between neighborhoods, cities, and landscapes. But cars do notonly cut across public space, they also determine the form and use of public space. Cities and towns are organizedaround cars, and, on a larger scale, the earth’s climate is being altered by cars. In this way, the car is a symbol ofhuman domination of the planet and the various crises that result from that domination.
Many of Frang’s works address crises that are not easy to apprehend. “Creeping crisis” is a concept used acrossacademic disciplines to describe an emergency that occurs so gradually that it may not be perceived by the peo-ple whose lives it threatens to disrupt. For example, wind currents are not something that humans see, control,or even fully predict, but which are affected by human behavior. As extreme weather becomes more common, it iscertain that the wind will occasionally destroy human infrastructure much as Frang has destroyed this car: it willlift things off the ground and drop them crashing down again.
Crises are not only invisible, of course. They can also become heavily mediatized and hyper-visible, though thatvisibility does not always contribute to a solution or even to action. A keen awareness of crisis can also lead to asort of hypnotized spectatorship - which is not unrelated to the experience of watching WIND. It is hard to lookaway from the video. After all, it can be fascinating and pleasurable to watch something get destroyed - one seesthe limits of an object’s coherency, what it becomes when it is broken apart and transformed.
That said, WIND does not seek to command the viewer. Frang’s approach to video is sculptural - one can look fora few moments or linger for longer. Like a sculpture, the more attention one gives, the more detail is revealed. Butunlike a sculpture, WIND is also narrative, it moves steadily and repetitively toward an inevitable conclusion, thecomplete destruction of the car. As hinted at by the title, there is something elemental in this inevitability. As Frangsays, WIND activates a similar impulse as looking into a fire - watching the video is like “looking at a campfire andwaiting for it to slowly die out.”
The exhibition is supported by Statens Kunstfond, Rådet for visuel kunst and Ny Carlsbergfondet.
