Artist: Deborah Kelly Work: In the Mean Time(2016-17) Partner: Kirsten Kjaers Museum Location: Thy-Lejren, Denmark
During her time at Kirsten Kjaers Museum in remote north-west Denmark over the summers of 2016 and 2017, Deborah Kelly organized a series of workshops exploring the broad thematic framework of ‘imagining a future’. Acting as both student and teacher the outcomes of Kelly’s workshops series were presented at the North by Southeast exhibition at AGWA.
Kelly sees her workshop series as a contribution to the ongoing health, connectedness, and creativity of the Kirsten Kjaers Museum.
“The camp, an experiment in alternate lifestyles, continues after more than 40 years with about 40 inhabitants, many of them little children. People live in all kinds of imaginary architectures, like a village in Middle Earth.” Deboarh Kelly
About the artist: Deborah Kelly is a Sydney-based artist whose works have been shown around Australia, and in the Singapore, Sydney and Venice Biennales. Her projects across media are concerned with lineages of representation, politics and history in public exchange.
Kelly's 2001 collaboration with Tina Fiveash, Hey, hetero! has been shown and studied extensively, and has appeared in a new Greek translation for the 2015 Biennale of Thessaloniki. She is a founding member of the boat-people artist collective, most recently included in the 2014 TarraWarra Biennial. Her work Tank Man Tango: a Tiananmen Memorial was included in Zero Tolerance at MOMA PS1, NYC, (2014 - 2015), toured to Basel Miami, and subsequently was performed in over 20 cities around the world on 4 June 2009 to mark the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests. Her MCA-commissioned work considering the rise of religiosity in the public sphere, Beware of the God, included videos in train stations, 40,000 postcards and projections onto clouds over Sydney Harbour.
Kelly’s artworks have been shown in galleries and cinemas around Australia, in London, Cologne, Weimar, Leipzig, Moscow, St Petersburg, Seoul, Paris, Rio, Zagreb, Prague, Brno, Hong Kong, Vienna, Jakarta and several US cities.
About our partner: The Kirsten Kjaers Museum is a non-profit association and a private art museum, with a large collection of drawings and paintings by Kirsten Kjær (1893 – 1985), located in the North region of Denmark.