Marie Kølbæk Iversen: Donnimaar. Histories of Predation
Performance et book launch
On June 18th, the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève and Wilde co-host the launch of Marie Kølbæk Iversen’s new book Histories of Predation.
Histories of Predation will be shown in the Cinema Dynamo, where Kølbæk Iversen will perform these merpeople songs as part of her performance project Donnimaar. The performance will be followed by drinks and a book signing at Wilde (located at Boulevard Georges-Favon 19).
Histories of Predation chronicles Kølbæk Iversen’s video work by the same name, which is based on microscopic video recordings from within the eye lenses of the gurry shark, also known as the grey shark or Greenland shark. Through carbon-14 dating of its eye lens nuclei, recent marine biological research has shown that the shark may live to become as old as 272 to 512 years, which opens up a perspective of more-than-human ‘eye witnessing’ that far exceeds the human life span. Across the Nordic-Germanic languages, the grey shark has traditionally been designated as a ‘merperson’: In Icelandic and Danish as ‘merman’—‘hákarl’/‘havkal’—and in Norwegian and Swedish as ‘mermaid’—‘håkjerringa’/‘håkjäring.’ For the launch, Kølbæk Iversen activates these mythological axes of the Atlantic Ocean by performing folksongs from her East Atlantic home region in Western Jutland that features merpeople as dissident Others in relation to the Danish state and its authorities.
About the artist:
Marie Kølbæk Iversen (*Herning, Denmark, 1981) lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. Vocalist of Donnimaar since 2017. Visual artist MFA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2008, and PhD in practice-based visual art from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2023. Kølbæk Iversen works across time-based, image-borne, and sculptural, media. She has exhibited and performed extensively in Scandinavia and abroad, among others at the 11th Gwangju Biennial (KR), the Centre d’art contemporain Genève (CH), Henie Onstad Art Centre (NO), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (DK). Her work is represented in notable collections, such as the Danish National Gallery (DK), Malmö Konstmuseum (SE), and the ARKEN Museum of Modern Art (DK). Histories of Predation (Mousse Publishing, 2024) is her most recent artist book.
About the book:
Histories of Predation is a book about active mythic thinking and scientific storytelling, about fright, trauma, and potentials for transformation. It traces Marie Kølbæk Iversen’s critical reimagining of subjectivity and cultural history, from Mirror Therapy (2015–16) and Io/I (2015–19) to Histories of Predation (2022–) and the performance project Donnimaar(2017–). Interrogating the demographic and aesthetic homogenization of the mid-nineteenth-century Danish nation-state and the ensuing forced forgetting of divergent identities, the book offers a deep-time view on processes of nation building by probing the geopolitical “mythologics” they hinge on.
Published by Mousse and Podere Trafonti
Texts by Marie Kølbæk Iversen, Adam Khalil, Isabella Rjeille, and Yann Chateigné Tytelman
Design by Maximage
2024
English / Italian
136 pages
Hardcover, 19 x 26 cm
ISBN 978-88-6749-598-6
€27 / $30
Histories of Predation is part of the Podere Trafonti notebook series.
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