KIRSTINE ROEPSTORFF
A HANDFULL OF ONCE
At first glance Kirstine Roepstorffs intricate and ornamental collages belie their more serious subject. Her baroque photo-montage combines geometric shapes, glitter, jewellery and gems with lush tropical landscapes and floral motifs. National Geographic images of birds, fish and mammals are juxtaposed with dancers and sports people, politicians and protesters. Much of the imagery is drawn from newspapers and magazines – the stuff of current affairs.
By removing the material from its original context and reordering it within this other space, she performs a surprisingly powerful, political action addressing issues as diverse as the War on Terror, the global distribution of wealth and contemporary gender politics. Asking, Who decides who decides? her work questions the authority, identity and power of the individuals and organisations responsible for the particular reality we experience and the ways in which meaning is constructed.
PERSPECTIVE
Deimantas Narkevi?ius and Kirstine Roepstorff both employ techniques of appropriation and montage within their very different practices. Narkevi?ius works within the time-based, cinematic space of film and video, Roepstorff in the physical, material space of the collage. There is a potent but poetic politics running through both artists work. Each, in their different way, gently but incisively problematise and undermine the received authoritarian and hierarchical structures of our global society, opening up or imagining another kind of space – a space of potential, of resistance, and of freedom. Martin Clark, Curator, Arnolfini.