COPENHAGEN.- Louisiana’s autumn exhibition, Being There, presents 10 international artists with a focus on mankind’s navigation between physical and digital reality. The works, several created specifically for this exhibition, are the artist’s interpretations of human existence in the forms it takes in the light of the widespread and ongoing digitalization of our lives.

Life is increasingly taking form on the premises of the Internet. We conform to its laws; we choose the paths it points out for us; we adhere to the facts with which it presents us; we meet the significant other it says is a match for us. Smartphones and computers in that sense become extensions of ourselves – digital limbs, because they take over a range of chores, actions and functions we have earlier had to deal with ourselves.

The emergence of the Internet has also influenced the visual arts through a succession of different artistic approaches, strategies and theories. This exhibition highlights a selection of artists whose works describe the human condition as both directly and indirectly affected by the ever increasing impact of the Internet on the individual’s self-understanding and understanding of the surrounding world; that is, works which examine fundamental existential questions such as “Who am I? Where am I? How am I?”

Humanity’s fascination with and fear of technological development is far from new. It is part of the basic narrative of being human. Each time a new invention attempts to alleviate or improve our condition, it also takes something from us; something we were before, or something we could do before; what we are is not what we were. The greatest quantum leaps in technological development may thus also be associated with the feeling of loss of identity.

The artists in the exhibition show us the interactions between a physical and a virtual world, the distinctions between biology and the machine, the shifts in the conception of the apparently real and the apparently false. The existential feeling of both presence and absence that has grown out of this process of navigation is precisely what the exhibition title BEING THERE refers to. In the exhibition, existence is seen as situated in a kind of interregnum, a state of ‘in-betweenness’ where humanity is rarely and wholly in a place, but is distributed over different compartments.

The exhibition is being shown in the East Wing of the museum, in the Column Gallery and the Hall Gallery.

It consists mainly of large installations, including several video works that surround the viewer, but it also involves media such as sculpture and painting.