ME CONTEMPORARY, NY ADELGADE 7, DK-1104 CPH | MALOU ERRITZØE, +45 21 48 30 26, ME@MECONTEMPORARY.COM
Flipside of Family
For the first time since his career within the movies took off, Mikkel Munch-Fals exhibits his own works. It happens with the exhibition Flipside of Family, which opens on Thursday, 24 November at gallery ME contemporary. And knowing Mikkel Munch-Fals, we will not be sweet-talked when everyday life is laid out before us, as he uncovers the layers of his own anti-heroic role within the family hierarchy.
In Flipside of Family, we are invited into a private photo album. Not just any album -- one that shows us the expected set of family photos and documentation of a happy, normal life. Here, it is rather the flip side of the coin, we are permitted to see -- all the unspoken truths and all the opposite of what a family would like to be. Here it is insecurity, loneliness, fear and the disappointed expectations, to which we bear witness.
Only a few years ago, to have family photos developed entailed a major set-up in the form of a darkroom, various liquids, limited light, and limitless patience. Only few people had access to all this at once. Today, one need only a digital camera, printer, and photo paper. Easy for everyone. And yet, if by chance you turn the photo paper wrong-side up, or the color from your printer does not bind to it as it should, the result is a process of mutation which begins to unfold: the color flows out and the image of one's near and dear disintegrates in front of you, while the comfortable and familiar becomes alien and scary.
This mutation is seen directly in some of the works, and the process, as such, forms the conceptual basis for Mikkel Munch-Fals' exhibition. Flipside of Family is an exhibition about the cracked facade and a feeling of alienation from the safe and familiar. The Austrian philosopher and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud had a term for this tension, which he divided into Heimlich and Unheimlich. Das Heimliche (German: familiar) denotes the safe, but the word also bears another meaning, namely, the secret and forbidden, the repressed and ugly.
It is the fear of das Unheimlich which this exhibition dares to face and explore. Imagine if all you believe suddenly turned out to be misguided. Is the one we really love, truly the person he / she purports to be? And if behind the emotion for that loved one and the care for the little creatures you have brought to the world, lies coldness and feeling of powerlessness, bordering on the dangerous and destructive. If all our relationships are based on imaginary ideas, are we then in reality all alone?
These questions – with a good deal of insider knowledge from a frustrated family man's universe – are the focal point of the exhibition. We see records of roadside kills on innocent, stray animals carried out in the family-friendly Berlingo, and sad internet sex chasing off everyday triviality -- all experiments, however, nothing prevents a terrifying alienation from sneaking into everyday life. The sadness is interrupted by the humorous – and slightly ludicrous – a caricature of the collapse of the masculine that seems to be an inevitable consequence.
That Mikkel Munch-Fals thinks his images cinematic, seems almost to be a premise for the exhibition. This is especially evident in his collages, where the viewer sees how an image rarely stands alone, rather, as part of a series of events in the same sequence. The same applies to the individual images, vibrating of something mysterious and inexplicable, something not yet told, nor will it ever be, but that stimulates the viewer to continue the sequence and ask the question: what is happening and what will happen? What is it we see?
Flipside of Family presents works ranging from the scary and horrible to the warm and humorous - from das Unheimliche to the (apparently) reassuringly recognizable. ME contemporary is delighted to exhibit these intense and thought-provoking works and provides, through this rare exhibition, an insight into Mikkel Munch-Fals' brutally honest universe.
In Flipside of Family, we are invited into a private photo album. Not just any album -- one that shows us the expected set of family photos and documentation of a happy, normal life. Here, it is rather the flip side of the coin, we are permitted to see -- all the unspoken truths and all the opposite of what a family would like to be. Here it is insecurity, loneliness, fear and the disappointed expectations, to which we bear witness.
Only a few years ago, to have family photos developed entailed a major set-up in the form of a darkroom, various liquids, limited light, and limitless patience. Only few people had access to all this at once. Today, one need only a digital camera, printer, and photo paper. Easy for everyone. And yet, if by chance you turn the photo paper wrong-side up, or the color from your printer does not bind to it as it should, the result is a process of mutation which begins to unfold: the color flows out and the image of one's near and dear disintegrates in front of you, while the comfortable and familiar becomes alien and scary.
This mutation is seen directly in some of the works, and the process, as such, forms the conceptual basis for Mikkel Munch-Fals' exhibition. Flipside of Family is an exhibition about the cracked facade and a feeling of alienation from the safe and familiar. The Austrian philosopher and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud had a term for this tension, which he divided into Heimlich and Unheimlich. Das Heimliche (German: familiar) denotes the safe, but the word also bears another meaning, namely, the secret and forbidden, the repressed and ugly.
It is the fear of das Unheimlich which this exhibition dares to face and explore. Imagine if all you believe suddenly turned out to be misguided. Is the one we really love, truly the person he / she purports to be? And if behind the emotion for that loved one and the care for the little creatures you have brought to the world, lies coldness and feeling of powerlessness, bordering on the dangerous and destructive. If all our relationships are based on imaginary ideas, are we then in reality all alone?
These questions – with a good deal of insider knowledge from a frustrated family man's universe – are the focal point of the exhibition. We see records of roadside kills on innocent, stray animals carried out in the family-friendly Berlingo, and sad internet sex chasing off everyday triviality -- all experiments, however, nothing prevents a terrifying alienation from sneaking into everyday life. The sadness is interrupted by the humorous – and slightly ludicrous – a caricature of the collapse of the masculine that seems to be an inevitable consequence.
That Mikkel Munch-Fals thinks his images cinematic, seems almost to be a premise for the exhibition. This is especially evident in his collages, where the viewer sees how an image rarely stands alone, rather, as part of a series of events in the same sequence. The same applies to the individual images, vibrating of something mysterious and inexplicable, something not yet told, nor will it ever be, but that stimulates the viewer to continue the sequence and ask the question: what is happening and what will happen? What is it we see?
Flipside of Family presents works ranging from the scary and horrible to the warm and humorous - from das Unheimliche to the (apparently) reassuringly recognizable. ME contemporary is delighted to exhibit these intense and thought-provoking works and provides, through this rare exhibition, an insight into Mikkel Munch-Fals' brutally honest universe.