Artist: Danius Kesminas Work: Either Or(2017-18) Partner: FABRIKKEN for Kunst go Design Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
Danius Kesminas’ residency at FABRIKKEN for Kunst go Design, Copenhagen culminated in a series of new performance and video-based artworks inspired by Søren Kierkegaard's first published work, Either/Or. Kesminas questions the binary connection between aesthetics and ethics, linked to his experience as a residency artist, moving between the artist studio (the safe creative space of aesthetics), and the city (the unpredictable urban society influenced by ethics).
Either/Or stimulates several cross-connections, which in a freestyle energetic way and with multimedia expressions, create an artistic comment on the dualistic settings in our society. As in several previous projects, Kesminas’ unique artistic style deliberately crosses the borders between styles, artistic expressions, social layers, generations and spaces.
About the artist: Danius Kesminas’ arts practice is project-based, multi-disciplinary, cross-cultural, inter-medial and highly collaborative. Of central concern to Kesminas is the consideration of trans-nationality as an intellectual framework to rethink the concepts of globalisation, and regional and cultural specificity. Through his interests Kesminas explores the conduits, overlaps, and intersections of heterogeneous histories – of culture, sub-culture and geo-politics – through visual and built form, and musical and performative events.
Kesminas is the co-founder of a number of on-going projects including: the visual art-music collective Slave Pianos (since 1998); the “concept-art-(heritage)-rock cover band The Histrionics (since 2002); and the Indonesian “post-disaster” art collective and “mystic-pubk” band Punkasila (since 2006).
Kesminas was born in Melbourne and holds a Masters of Art (Fine Arts) from RMIT University, Melbourne. Since 1991 Kesminas has exhibited and performed in Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, Cuba, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Indonesia, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Spain, Russia, the UK, the USA, Vietnam, and Australia.
About our partner: FABRIKKEN for Kunst og Design is a not-for-profit, formerly artist run institution established in 1992, that acts primarily as an art production and knowledge centre, which provides affordable studios and work spaces for professional artists and designers. In addition to providing studio spaces and running various residency programs, FABRIKKEN contains a production hall, which is used for exhibitions, events and artistic productions.
FABRIKKEN is located in a highly diverse area of Copenhagen and neighboring institutions include a homeless shelter, a nursery, a youth detention center, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, the IT University and the Faculty of Humanities.
