Lets Gets Lost
Frans Jacobi
Stalke Kunsthandel/Galleri
Vesterbrogade 14a
6.10-31.10.1995
Press Release
Frans Jacobi at Stalke Kunsthandel
Over the previous four years, Frans Jacobi had worked on a series of installations that were shown across Scandinavia and Europe. These installations could be experienced as individual works but also as parts of a larger collective narrative: a fragmented story about a person, consistently portrayed through absence. Each installation described a situation this person had been in—claustrophobic snapshots in which isolation, escapism, and a lack of communication unfolded in a melancholic, and often absurdly humorous, staging.
All of the installations were temporary, and none existed as permanent works. Frans Jacobi’s working method could be compared to classical music: the work existed as an instruction and was then performed as needed in different exhibition contexts. Each performance, titled Room, formed the basis of the work but was simultaneously adapted to the specific exhibition setting—visually, spatially, and culturally. After each exhibition, the installation was dismantled, and the work once again existed only as an instruction. Within this structure, documentation played a crucial role: it was solely through documentation that the works continued to exist after the exhibitions, and only through documentation that they could be perceived as a coherent whole. Parallel to the installations, Jacobi also worked on transforming this documentation into independent works—Documents—such as photographs, objects, and multiples.
The exhibition Let’s Get Lostat Stalke Kunsthandel consisted of three installations—Room 8, Room 9, and Room 11—as well as a series of Documents. This marked the first time Frans Jacobi presented these installations together as a complete project in Denmark.
Installation view from Frans Jacobi’s exhibition Lets Gets Lost at Stalke Galleri, 1995
The exhibition Let’s Get Lost at Stalke Kunsthandel in 1995 brought together three of Frans Jacobi’s installations – Room 8, Room 9, and Room 11 – and marked an important moment in his artistic practice during the 1990s. The installations were conceived as atmospheric spaces in which light, colour, sound, and sparse scenographic elements created psychologically charged situations.
Contemporary reviews emphasised that Jacobi worked with absence rather than narrative: the viewer entered rooms marked by loneliness, longing, and subtle shifts between memory and the present. In Room 9, a melancholic mood was reinforced through blue tones and repetitive visual elements, while other rooms suggested traces of a dramatic event without offering any clear explanation.
Critics noted that Jacobi’s works did not exist as permanent objects, but as temporary stagings that only came into being through the viewer’s experience. Documentation – photographs and texts – therefore played a crucial role in the afterlife of the works. Let’s Get Lost was described as an exhibition that explored existence as a construction, inviting the viewer to lose themselves in the space between fiction and reality.
Installation view and details from Frans Jacobi’s exhibition Lets Gets Lost at Stalke Galleri, 1995