Vibe Kilde’s practice explores human/non-human relations, time, emotional truths, and the interaction between physical and psychological memory. Using printmaking, sculpture, text, found objects, and photography often within engrossing installations, she tests the borderline of the eerie and cartoonish, the repulsive and attractive, the ideal and the vulgar, the animated and the dormant, alive and dead. Active also in writing poetry and prose, Kilde tells ambivalent stories where different lifeworlds collide and intermingle, where each object performs a role like in a play, and where her titles function as a sort of manuscript. Her installation alle dine du / innfiltrer / alle mine jeg (all of your yous / intertwining / all of my selves) brings several interrelated works and inquiries into a swarming multiverse of overlapping perspectives and mutations. A central critter in this story is the rat, those detestable rodents that thrive in the anthropocene, showing up in places where they are unwanted and parasitizing our systems by redirecting surplus and occupying human environments in unexpected ways. The rat here functions not only as a vector for disease and disgust, but also as a model for collectivity and resilience akin to the cockroach that will outlast us all. An etching depicts the fabled rat king, where the tails of a group of rodents become entangled and intertwined to form a colonial organism, a monstrous hybrid emerging from the teeming mass. This figure, and related etchings, prints, sculptures, and images, are not meant to shock, but rather function as models for intimate collective bonds, where individuals become literally and figuratively tied together in survival, forming a shared world.
As an insurgent gesture, Kilde’s infestation has also spilled out into numerous surreptitious locations throughout the exhibition, infecting the Kunsthal, infiltrating other works, spaces, and discourses, and making us aware of the creatures and worlds that occupy the unseen corners of our reality. The rat’s ability to burrow and invade space operates as a loaded metaphor for the foreign, the intruder, the rejected being, where their crossing of boundaries and production of passages creates a point of contact between hidden and visible worlds, tunneling from one environment to the next, one point of view to another. Kilde includes an assortment of portals and passages in her display, including photographs that feature a hole from a miniature golf course, as well as images and objects that mark the thresholds of visibility. In addition, congregations of discarded materials coalesce into curious, complex hybrids while mutated flowers grow like insidious weeds from the powerplugs and heater of the room. Such objects function as poetry here, as syntactical tools that build a joint rhythm and exchange meanings across hierarchies and materialities, burrowing into our minds and bodies through language, and contaminating the space with associations.
As both a supplement and an autonomous acknowledgement of her practice in poetry and prose, Kilde has also produced a publication of selected written works that the artist has on offer in the bookstore and will present as a live reading for the Afgang Live event on April 24.
Photos by David Stjernholm.
