Exhibition // nordiSKulptur 3: Ida Brockmann and Anna-Lea Kopperi // Galleria Sculptor

Ida Brockmann’s and Anna-Lea Kopperi’s exhibition at Galleria Sculptor is part of the four-year collaborative project between the Association of Finnish Sculptors and Nordic Culture Point that brings forth Nordic sculpture. The 2021 exhibition project is organised in collaboration with Danish artist and curator Peter Holmgård.

Ida Brockmann was born in 1991 and she lives and works in Copenhagen. She graduated as a Bachelor of Arts from the Valand Academy in Gothenburg. Her art consists of various techniques and materials, including most recently ceramics, stones, and videos. Brockmann is interested in material culture and in those objects that surround us and that we leave behind. Her way of working brings to light the cultural and social layers that are linked to everyday objects, and she strives to alter the existing conception of these objects.

“The relation between the hand, the tool, and the digitalization are the focal point in my works for the exhibition. Through our hands, we sense our surroundings. As the prehistoric human learned to walk and rose from the ground, the hands became free. With the hands, the human learned to produce stone tools which led to further production of new tools and technologies which through many thousands of years have become more and more sophisticated and advanced. Today, most people’s primary tool is the smartphone. In my works, I aim to explore the very close and concrete digital everyday life, its materiality, and our perception of it.”

Anna-Lea Kopperi works on conceptual art with different medias. She is internationally known for her environmental installations, public sculptures, and participatory works. At the 56th Venice Biennale, she implemented a participatory environmental installation Isle of Dreams. Her recent exhibitions are participatory project Lake of Dreams in Yerevan, Net of Dreams at Didrichsen Art Museum in Helsinki, and mirror installations Room of Angels and Mirrors of Times at Within Light/Inside Glass exhibitions in Venice and Lisbon. The visual artist studied in Finland, France and Germany, and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf in 1996.

”In my ephemeral oeuvre, I combine my perceptions of spaces with existential questions like life and death, time and continuity. In the exhibition at Sculptor, I relocate and recycle materials as comments about the architectural, environmental, and mental space. On the window benches and on the floors, I compose multitudes of forms and reflections with hundreds of handmade mirror fragments from Murano. The dark studio space invited me to create a site-specific installation with different sizes of mirror glasses, black coal, and white cotton. Small life rescue lights recycled from old life-west jackets, illuminate the installation as long as their batteries endure, speaking about the limits of life. The reordered leftovers of mirrors, collected from trashes of glass factories, multiply every detail of the space together with the moving visitors like on a filmstrip to ponder on own existence here and now.”

In the exhibition, Brockmann and Kopperi present also a collaborative work, which deals with communication over distance and time. The physical outcome is made of individual, primary materials of both artists. At the same time, the conceptual work reveals the very space and time in-between them.

The Nordic Culture Point is the main funder of the exhibition. Ida Brockmann´s work is supported by the Danish Art Foundation. Anna-Lea Kopperi´s work is supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation.