HELLO DARKNESS

Esbjerg Art Museum, Esbjerg, 2017

Photo: Torben E. Meyer

Using ‘darkness’ as the overarching and unifying touch, Hello Darkness is developed especially for the characteristic daylight-free exhibition room that was originally intended by Esbjerg Art Museum as a storage room. 

The exhibition title Hello Darkness refers directly to the initial lines from Simon and Garfunkel’s Sound of Silence – a dream, in which people live in isolation and a dark void descends among them. However in the song the words ‘hello darkness’ are followed by a reconciliatory ‘my old friend’ that indicates that even in darkness, conversations may take place.

The status of the storage room as a space of no daylight, in which we, in more or less well-structured ways, keep and heap up artefacts, materials, interpretations, and ideas, has become an important pivotal point for Hello Darkness as a coherent project. In the storage room, we keep the past in the hope that we shall be able to re-topicalize it in a future ‘now’. In this way, the deposited phenomena establish a latent resource which is tied to the hope for potential re-activation. For in the darkness, what was thought to be well-known acquires a surprising new expression, while the unknown, now drawn to the fore, often appears to be quite different from what you expected.