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  1. FULL OF DAYS

    Kunsthal Charlottenborg

    Group Show

    Insight Out
    2023
    Mixed media
    370 × 100 × 90 cm
    Courtesy the artist

    Maya Angelou’s powerful 1969 poem Caged Bird concludes with a poignant message:

    “The caged bird sings / with a fearful trill / of things unknown / but longed for still / and his tune is heard / on the distant hill / for the caged bird / sings of freedom.”

    This stanza vividly captures the resilience of those who continue to express themselves, despite facing adversity and attempts at silencing.

    Even though Angelou’s poem is rooted in the oppression historically connected to Blackness, Sahar Jamili takes it as their inspiration to explore different, perhaps more subtle, forms of captivity connected to their situated experience.

    In the sculpture Insight Out, a number of rugs are metaphorically caged above a sculpture resting on a platform made from unused old bricks from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, temporarily borrowed from the sculpture garden.

    The piece draws its inspiration from Charlottenborg’s historical exhibitions which exoticised non-Western cultures, such as the annual Magasin du Nord carpet exhibitions that, for 31 years (between 1898 and 1929), displayed precious non-Western goods in showroom-like, ‘orientalist’-style commercial shows. Or the 1952 exhibition Skatte fra det Fjerne(Treasures From Far Away), which showcased various objects and artefacts from non-Western countries in an explicitly exoticising manner.

    By reflecting on how the Danish colonial legacy has entered and influenced these exhibition halls on numerous occasions, the work addresses the often unspoken racist biases of Danish culture and society.