download catalogue high resolution pdf (22.3 mb) - Jens Haaning

marginality, madness, since it is about an insane character. Displayed as a poster
which could maybe announce a political meeting or a conference, the work nonetheless
retains, as often in Haaning’s work, an allusion to something private yet expressed
in a form that is more than personal. Jens Haaning’s work almost always contains
autobiographical traces or clues, but they are always very discreet and ungraspable,
at least for those viewers who do not know him personally.
Rejecting personal forms of expression in favor of collective, more than personal
utterances, Jens Haaning’s work implicitly affirms a close interrelation between
the personal and the political. Speaking about foreigners, for instance, Jens
Haaning has once compared the position of artists in society, and his own in
particular, to the position of immigrants. This is a personal feeling, but inside his
work it translates into more than a personal statement. Jens Haaning: "In a certain
way, the artist is a kind of marginal figure, and he has things in common with other
marginal figures, such as immigrants. The great difference is that the artist, unlike
the immigrant, works as a medium for society. One thus pays a lot of attention to
what he wants to say with his work or his discourse, while a Muslim, for example,
is rarely asked for his opinion about society." 6
Jens Haaning turns what at first can be perceived as a weakness into a strength, a
potentially productive resource. He uses this marginal position as a privileged critical
point of view from which to perceive more clearly the conventions, the perceptual
and conceptual habits that constitute the power relations running across the art
institution and society as a whole. Michel Foucault wrote that "a critique is not to
say that things are not the way they should be. It involves seeing on what kind of
obvious facts, familiar things, innate and unreflected modes of thinking the practices
we accept are grounded." 7 Power does not lie outside discourse and representation,
in a few clearly identified and institutional authority figures — public (the State and
its institutions) or private (the corporation) power — as the art which uses
agit-prop assumes. Disseminated on all levels of society, what we call power also
lies in the way people speak or are silent, in the way we look at the other sex, the
insane, or the foreign…
Modernist art has accustomed us to a certain kind of idealization of the figure of the
Other, under the guise of the foreign, the primitive, the child, the insane, etc. It is a
recurrent and constitutive representation of modernist art and criticism. A certain
number of these figures — such as the mentally ill, the outlaw, the alien — return
insistently in Jens Haaning’s work. But while foreigners, especially in Europe, are
the objects of a form of taboo within representation, which excludes them as subjects,
VPD
P.011