Lives and works in Copenhagen.
She questions the way in which economic and social structures influence our actions and our being. Her sculptures and installations are based on everyday objects and industrial products, whether found or purchased. Marked by a strong reference to the present as much as to the history of art, these often abstruse, often humorous arrangements offer a sociological and critical vision of an era turned towards consumerism and increasingly abstract social relations in a globalised context.
Benedikte Bjerre is a graduate of the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main (2015) and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (2016). Her work has been exhibited in venues such as Overgaden (2023), Kunstverein Göttingen (2021), SMK - The National Gallery of Denmark (2020) and ARKEN Museum of Modern Art (2019).
©Group Therapy ARKEN Photo by David Stjernholm Lisa’s Chickens (Farm Life) 2016-2022
The title of the work refers to a video game with an emoji aesthetic in which the player takes on the role of Lisa in her everyday, mundane life on the farm. Market gardening and agriculture, although at the origins of humanity, are hijacked, fictionalised and transformed into addictive digital consumption. Nature is nothing more than entertainment, emptied of its vital substance, and the balloons are the embodiment of this appropriation and reproduction of reality through cartoonish digital copying.On each leg of these helium hens is inscribed one of the 50 most popular female first names. Behind the title is an allusion to the English expression A chick, which in French could be translated as poulette, a colloquial term used pejoratively to refer to a young girl. Like a feminist stroke of irony, the balloons are released into the space and made available to visitors. They can be manipulated and thrown into the air. Some may even be carried away, as the work tickles our desire to possess, our almost fetishistic penchant for objects.
In this metaphorical flea market that is the exhibition, the balloons are a reminder of the feeling of a crowd, and of the disorderly movements between the stands.
