Installation shot. Photo: Anders Sune Berg 01/07

In his exhibition, Kasper Akhøj presents his latest research-based works charting the proliferation of history. Akhøj shows how design and architecture can be overwhelmed by historical layers and communicate various personal stories.

The photographic work Welcome (TO THE TEKNIVAL) documents the restauration of the architect Eileen Gray’s iconic modernist Villa E. 1027 in southern France. The villa was built as a response to and a critique of Le Corbusier’s architecture, but was later – paradoxically enough, and without Gray’s permission – decorated with nine murals by Le Corbusier himself. The villa is currently being restored – not to its original condition, but including the murals.
The work Abstracta (2007-) likewise tells a story of design in the margins of traditional historiography. The display system Abstracta was designed by the Danish architect Poul Cadovius for a world fair in 1960, then cloned and mass produced in China in the 1970s, and afterwards exported to various other countries around the world, including the former Yugoslavia. Akhøj presents the project with a series of abstract sculptures.

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