ÅSA FRANKENBERG

UNCERTAINTY LAB is a new initiative for a place to work, to meet and exchange ideas between artists who value and wish, in their own work, to prioritise art practices that are

– Environmentally, professionally and personally sustainable.

– Seeking a way to respond through art to some of the big ecological, peace and social issues of today, addressing and even embracing the uncertainties that these issues generate.

– Connecting to specific places and to the communities who reside there, and drawing on what there is in the place, making art from materials and subject matter that are found in these places.

– Collaborations across the art disciplines.

– Welcoming participation from outside the art world, for example, historians, scientists, architects, and anthropologists, as well as from communities in the places where the art is made.

 

This is a journey. The sites of our work change. Our work is created for each site where we work and exhibit, in a relationship with the place, the materials and the people.

​

Questions and issues. So many topics challenge us today. Seen through the competing lenses of science, philosophy and politics as well as art, the big question is humanity’s place in a world we are steadily trashing. But starting with that question... Doubtful, for has our self-centredness become a trap? Perhaps thought is not the most important activity of the brain while the planet is not here for us humans.

​

A new artistic perspective searches for what falls in between the major pillars of ordinary perception and finds a way to let what lies in-between be seen and heard. It starts with a location and what is there, working from and with a place, with the people and materials, to identify what is not quite there but could be.

​

Embracing uncertainty entails a commitment to both openness and humility. To make some progress, diverse perspectives, techniques and backgrounds can meet to see what can be created. We foresee guests and interlocutors who are not artists as well as those who are, events that are artistic workshops and exhibitions and others that take a different form.

 

Taken together, all this means looking at linkages between questions on a global scale and a community /personal scale and working with great attention on ecological necessities and sustainability. Collaboration is key to how we conceive of this project, key to why we have started it. We want the collaboration to spread, to include more people and more themes – above all, more challenges. The platform is an open-ended project, an open-minded space with a propensity to listen.

​

Who are we? So far, we are the people involved in the projects; we will grow from there. Åsa Frankenberg oversees the daily work and we have a core group developing the structure of the platform, as a form of Board. This is under construction.

 

UNCERTAINTY PROJECTS:

BUGS – THE DAY OF THE DEAD, COPENHAGEN LIGHTFESTIVAL 2022

​

WORK IN PROGRESS:

9 CHAPTERS – A film about what lives in the cracks, underneath, among the in-betweens, deep inside, deep down or far out. This is an exploration in both locations and time. The sites are spread over several countries and in 9 different sites.

Filming started March 2023.

 

TIME PAST TIME FUTURE – A site-specific sound piece built on the past, present and future of Nordhavnstippen in the north harbour area of Copenhagen. The project is invited by Miljøpunkt Østerbro København. Partly funded by Statens kunstfond, DK, Svenska Kulturrådet and By & Havn, Copenhagen.

 

DEEP TIME DEEP SPACE – A site-specific installation/performance in Oqaatsut, Greenland.

Deep Time is a geological term going back billions of years to when rocks were made and continents where shaped. Deep Space is the idea of a point where all different times co-exist beside each other.

A collaboration with Arctic Culture Lab. By Åsa Frankenberg & Birgitte Nystrøm