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

Right before Christmas last year, I received a package in the mail from him. A
calendar for the coming year. Very simple, almost businesslike in design. A separate
page with photo for each month: a portrait of a young couple in the park, a family at
a playground, two young men on the porch. Normal people, nothing exceptional.
But the title of the calendar reveals a snake in the grass: The Refugee Calendar
(2002). It proves to be portraits of people who have asked for asylum in Finland, and
at the moment of being photographed are still waiting for the answer to their request.
A year earlier, he had made a comparable series of photographs. Portraits of first
generation refugees in Copenhagen. Each photo is accompanied by a short text:
a detailed description of the clothing and accessories that the subjects are wearing,
plus the price that they paid for them in Danish krones. Antonio wears a pair of
secondhand pants by Kansas (35 DKK), underwear by Calvin Klein (250 DKK) and his
mobile telephone is a Motorola (500 DKK). Deniz has also ‘adapted well’ to ‘our
Western dress codes’: he wears Adidas training pants costing 200 DKK and a
Benetton sweater that he picked up in Turkey for the equivalent of 80 DKK.
I leaf further through the documentation and come across Brian, Knud and Caya.
The same portraits, the same facial expressions. And neither do I discover any
appreciable differences in clothing or price. Yet this is a different group of people
here. The caption declares that they are psychiatric patients who live in
Copenhagen. Suddenly an uncomfortable feeling comes over me. Migrants and ‘the
mentally disturbed’ may indeed both be kept outside the system — but ranking
them together is going too far for me. Doubts that I had had earlier now return.
Sometimes I have difficulties with artists who are actively engaged with — to put it
in a generalized way — certain minorities. Every once in a while I suspect these
artists of being stuck in thinking in antithetical terms. Or worse yet: that they
uphold and maintain opposites and contribute to polarisation. Every now and then I
also feel this in Jens, the overly rigid antithesis between power and powerlessness,
between haves and have-nots, those in authority and outsiders. I catch myself relating
such antithesis to his bipolar disorder. Would that have something to do with it? No,
now that I write this, I realize how presumptuous the thought is. And I realize that this
is the danger in naming the unnameable. In reducing the ‘disorderly alien’ to the
familiar. Captured in words, in paper theories, his projects can indeed seem like a
simple matter of addition. One plus one soon adds up to a category. From personal
experience, I know that in reality his work is more confusing and ambiguous, even
more light-hearted. I recall Bordeaux, where on a street corner in the Arab district
I was confronted with my own assumptions about the Arabian culture. Through a
loudspeaker that Jens had mounted on a lamppost, I heard different Arab inhabitants
of the district telling jokes in their own language. Thus, completely unintelligible to
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P.117