Platform - Toke Højby Lorentzen & Marie Vinther

In his artistic work, Toke Højby Lorentzen investigates how new meanings and connections arise when sign, language and material are recontextualised. This, among other, by juxtaposing forms of communication such as code languages and QR codes with historical communication systems such as punch cards and musical notation.

In the exhibition "Strategic Opacity, Opus 23", these juxtapositions form an echo chamber of translations and tangled meanings. In the exhibition space, a total of 40 metres long industrially produced fibreglass fabric is stretched between two metal racks. The woven fabric is an information image in which selected threads are systematically and manually unravelled, forming a hole pattern that can be read and played like a piece of music. The length of the fabric indicates the duration of the composition, while its width indicates the frequencies of the notes. The composition is inspired by the two organ works "Diptyque" and "Apparition de l’Eglise éternelle" by the French composer Olivier Messiaen from 1930 and 1932, respectively. The same period as the organ in the church nave of Nikolaj Kunsthal was built.

"Strategic Opacity, Opus 23" is a loop of translation and flow of information; a web of intertwined meanings where the interaction between the work of the hand and industrial technology is in constant negotiation. In the exhibition, the fabric’s information image becomes the starting point for further translation. As a spectrogram, as a score for organ, and as a piece of music; a recording of the organ at Nikolaj Kunsthal, which is played every fifteen minutes.

With the development of the industrial loom up through the 18th century, the punch card was used to store the pattern of the loom. The punch card indicated whether the thread should go over or under, hole or no hole. This principle is characteristic of binary code, which has also shaped inventions such as the music box, automated carillons, the self-playing piano, the pianola, and has as well been defining for modern computer technology. The fibreglass fabric thus inscribes itself into this narrative as fabric and as data set and the material usually used as building material is given renewed purpose and voice.

The exhibition takes its title from literary historian Stephen Greenblatt, who uses the term “strategic opacity” to describe the tantalising effect that occurs when information is deliberately withheld. Living with enormous and ambiguous amounts of information, "Strategic Opacity, Opus 23" reflects on our relationship with the actual, alleged and poetic connections and meanings that arise in the field of tension between the existing and what has been removed, what we sense and what we know, the detained and the visible.  

Where: Platform

When: 1/4 – 7/5 2023



Grand Opening on Friday 31 March at 4-7 pm