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A Timeline starting on the Surface,

2020 - 21

Untitled (A Timeline Starting on the Surface, material world, part 1), 2020-2021, marl, copper oxide, galvanized steel pipes, powder-coated steel, plastic basin, water, plastic bags, soil

Photo courtesy of the artist, 2021

83 x 670 x 195 cm, Detail

“(…) Such serves as a long-winded way to introduce a thought experiment at the heart of Nina Nowak’s latest body of work, A Timeline Starting on the Surface (2021). Seeded by her Grandfather’s oft-quoted “How many Devils sit on a needle’s end?”––a playful adaptation of the age-old, “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”––the term alludes to the idea that there could in fact be a great many thousand, if not infinite amount, imperceptible to the human eye. In more recent times, stripped of its theological context, it has come to be used as a metaphor for wasting time debating topics of no practical value. For Nowak, this question marks a generative point of arrival from where to explore the parameters of human comprehension more broadly. Most especially, drawing her to investigate that and those residing in what she refers to as “the borderlands” separating the intelligible from the otherwise. (...)”

Excerpt of exhibition text by Rosa De Graaf

Full text in Texts

“The artist regards the borderland as a latent body. One that we come to interact with directly and indirectly on a daily basis. By extension, Nowak’s new body of work––however disparate they may appear on the surface––may be similarly regarded as a singular entity. As if beholding the tunneled body from multiple perspectives simultaneously across time, an amalgam of viewpoints, conditions, and temporalities connected by a shared point of arrival and return. To comprehend it as such, however, requires submitting to the artist’s perpetual state of vision shifting as explored through questions of scale. How many Devils sit on a needle’s end? Rather than seeking an answer to this question through the space of art, what Nowak deftly effects is a blurring of the borders between animate and inanimate, intelligible and incomprehensible, engaging artmaking as a tool for resignification.”

Excerpt of exhibition text by Rosa De Graaf

  • Photo ducumentation by Stine Heger, Courtesy the artist, Gallery Susanne Ottesen. 2021

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Material World Pt. I, Equilibrium Tide, 2021/22

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MMAB. meet me at the beach, 2021