Retrospective: On the Un-Subjectified Persona

Torpedo is proud to publish the first retrospective on Kristensens work, focusing on the artist’s early life and art. The publication offers a unique visual overview of Kristensens life-long engagement and study of artistic life forms and alternative strategies, or what he himself identified as a forced commitment to the “braun und schwer-mindset”.

These core concepts and artistic impulses of Kristensen are intimately portrayed through an in-depth interview by Matias Faldbakken, shedding light to his formative, pre-career years. Gaby Hartel comments briefly on the cultural-historical backdrop of the “sprachmaske”-concept, crucial to his so-called Vienna-period. Kristian Øverland Dahl has taken the task of editing the highly problematic issues raised by Elin Seip in her poem on the un-subjectified persona, which attained a major influence to the artist’s later thinking. Pernille Albrethsen’s text departs from Kristensen’s central artwork The Troll Mirror, further elaborating the contradictions at work in his use of artistic personas and characters. Kjetil Røed offers a new understanding to Kristensen’s application of mnemotechnical operations and his quest to de-humanise the logic of experi-mental economy. Through the spectacles of the Abolitionist Movement, Leander Odin Djønne evokes the lethal political potentiality – and the public outrage that caused the destruction – of Stick #01, and its later model revisited in Stick #02.