Tanja Nellemann Poulsen

Tanja Nellemann Poulsen works in cut paper, collage, and intervening pop-up elements plucked from historical yearbooks and magazines along with contemporary images and texts from newspapers. Poulsen’s installations generally examine how history writing, various media, and the viewer construct narratives, as well as the way in which those narratives always have a certain focus or perspective—a subjective angle on events, facts, and social and political relations. In other words, there are no universal or objective ways of retelling, understanding, and constructing stories or such concepts as “us” and “them”—only subjective constructions. This distortion between the objective and the subjective can be dangerously manipulative and playfully reconstructive at the same time.

The Organization of Equality shows a group of men standing in a circle with their arms crossed, facing the viewer. At first glance, they look like a power circle of individualist men, some in business suits, all in tight formation to keep others out. They are formally linked by their uniform gestures, while they also close in on themselves. Upon closer inspection, however, they are less alike than first assumed; in other words, the equality here is organized and constructed. Perhaps, the force and power they all seem to radiate is fragile. Are they truly powerful, or are they really marionettes that can be moved around?

In another scenario, The Paradox of Unity, a floral bedspread comically merges with a woman’s dress. She is serving tea in a double bed to someone, presumably her husband. The scene is straight out of Bo Bedre magazine, a Danish Better Homes and Gardens, which has been selling the dream of the perfect home as a frame for the good life since 1961. The clipping shows a heterogeneous couple you could easily imagine disseminating the idea of happiness via house, garden, and trendy decorating. The cropping of the two figures and the addition of a dialogue balloon reading “The Paradox of Unity” on a floral background call into question the relationship between these two people. Does the man enthusiastically embrace the mouthpiece of female nurturing, or is he suffocating in an all-enclosing straight jacket? Or, more accurately, is the woman trapped in a pattern she cannot break out of? Taken out of context, the idealized unity Bo Bedre put on show forty or so years ago is transformed into an image reflecting social behavior patterns, interrelations, and potential conflicts in a relationship. Is the “floral couple” self-sufficient, like the closed circle of men with crossed arms, or are they fruitful unities that you may fear or envy, wish to be part of, or just laugh at?

Tanja Nellemann Poulsen’s staged scenarios challenge a number of power structures in various ways. What emerges, however, is a far from unambiguous collection of fanciful associations in terms of both form and memory. It is up to the viewer to make the connections, discern what is identical in the scenarios, and spot the deviations. Once there is room for humorous ambiguities, the inclusion and exclusion practiced by individuals and groups become unstable entities. Therein lies their potential.

Anja Raithel