Artists

Kristoffer Akselbo, Tore Hallas, Jo Norgreen, Victoria Olamide Lawal, Nanna Starck

Press release

A group exhibition with Jo Norgreen, Victoria Olamide Lawal, Kristoffer Akselbo, Tore Hallas and Nanna Starck The title of the exhibition refers to the French sociologist Émile Durkheim and his thought experiment about a society of saints: a perfect monastery where even the slightest mistakes would provoke the same outrage as serious crimes do in the wider society. Not because the mistakes are more serious, but because the boundaries of what is acceptable have become narrower. As collective morality strengthens, tolerance for deviation also shifts. Featuring works by Jo Norgreen, Victoria Olamide Lawal, Kristoffer Akselbo, Tore Hallas and Nanna Starck, Society of Saints centres on the deviant and the scapegoat. Spanning painting, sculpture, performance and video, the works navigate the spectrum between attraction and revulsion, identification and exclusion, humour and violence. The exhibition explores how monstrosity does not arise as an inherent trait, but is produced through social and cultural processes. Which bodies, desires and behavioural patterns are placed outside the community, and which mechanisms maintain these boundaries? Through mythological figures, bodily transformations and shifts in the logic of the norm, the works highlight stigma as a social technology: the need to conjure up monstrosity reduces the individual to a single trait, a single deviation or a single narrative. Here, the monster becomes not merely an image of the other, but a mirror in which the community’s own values and fearful fantasies are revealed.