Pigment print, 73 x 46 cm, series of three, edt. 3, 2 AP

The swinging eggs wander between the plates, taught and tactile, and shimmer in the darkness like little black holes. The dark tones and the eggs’ movement between the plates presents the egg’s surface as a black canvas, a kind of negative of touch, locked between the chemical process of etching and the raw surface of print. 

As an exhibition, Ovum is eminently curious about the egg and its meanings, all the things and organisms for which it stands. The works stage the viewer as a pendulum-like oscillation between the familiar, the alien, and the absurd. The viewer finds herself caught between the biology of perception and the calculus of abstraction. Are we essentially nothing but eggs (and thus, by extension, everything) or are we abstract forms? The egg has a place in many mythologies but is always characterised by a metonymical slippage into other “ovular” objects, from the testicle to the uterus, as Georges Batailles so provocatively puts it in Story of the Eye (1928). The egg is always more than itself, always its own other, and in Ovum the eggs push the viewer back and forth between all these possible meanings and mirror images. In this exhibition, as well as in Katja Bjørn’s oeuvre, the egg, like the human, never settles, never breaks, and never reveals its secrets.

Installation view from the solo show Ovum at Charlotte Fogh Gallery.

Photo: Mikkel Kaldal