Press Release

Frans Jacobi at Stalke Kunsthandel

Over the past four years, Frans Jacobi has worked on a series of works: a series of installations that have been exhibited across Scandinavia and Europe. These installations can be seen as individual works but also as part of a collective narrative. A fragmented story about a person, always portrayed through their absence. Each installation describes a situation this person has been in; a series of claustrophobic snapshots, where isolation, escapism, and a lack of communication skills play out in a melancholic, often absurdly humorous staging.

The installations have all been temporary, and none of them exist today as permanent works. Frans Jacobi's working method can be compared to classical music—a work exists as an instruction and is then performed as needed in various exhibition contexts. Each performance, Room, is the basis of the work but is simultaneously adapted to the specific exhibition setting—visually, spatially, and culturally. After each exhibition, the installation is dismantled, and the work exists once again only as Instruction. In this kind of work structure, documentation of the performances naturally plays a crucial role: it is only through documentation that the works live on after the exhibitions, and it is only as documentation that the works can be viewed as a cohesive whole. Jacobi therefore also works parallel to the installations to make the documentation of these into independent products, Documents, such as photography, objects, and multiples.

The exhibition Let’s Get Lost at Stalke Kunsthandel will consist of three installations: Room 8, Room 9, and Room 11, as well as a series of Documents. This is the first time Frans Jacobi presents these installations as a complete project in Denmark.

Reviews:

Existence as Construction

Frans Jacobi: LET'S GET LOST
Stalke Kunsthandel
Vesterbrogade 14 A, Copenhagen

Until October 31, 1995

“Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away.”

This is how the whispering tone from a tape player placed in a small, messy, and dusty tableau begins, which is part of three installations by the Danish artist Frans Jacobi (born 1960), currently exhibited at Stalke Kunsthandel in Copenhagen. The installations are part of a larger series of works, which have previously been shown in Scandinavia and Europe.

Frans Jacobi, who resides and works in Berlin and Copenhagen, adheres to the conceptual and relational currents in contemporary art. The idea that an individual work’s value is not in itself decisive but instead forms part of a larger context is central. Jacobi has constructed a framing work: “Let’s Get Lost,” where the exhibition title provides a description of a series of 13 rooms that exist in different forms and setups across various installations — Rooms & Documents being the larger framework for the installation.

In this exhibition, Jacobi uses two additional works as vehicles for the room concept — Instructions, where Jacobi himself plays a role, and Rooms, the designated color focus of the exhibition. These different levels of connection and relationship between the works clearly indicate Jacobi’s interest in unfolding his projects in several stages.

It is precisely this concept that has recently been discussed in relation to existence as a mediated reality. This reality emerges more as a construction and less as a real existence. Jacobi’s constructions reflect this mediated reality.

“Fittingly and illustratively, Let’s Get Lost is presented as a unified complexity: the human psyche as it manifests today through, e.g., journalism, mass media, and cultural constructions.”

The Absurd

As a consequence of this relationship and his own position as a staged artist, Frans Jacobi has chosen absurdity and humor as strategies to highlight the cultural constructions we call reality.

As the exhibition's title "Let's get lost" suggests, Jacobi directly addresses the senses’ reference, immersion, and perhaps the storytelling in his very associative works. In the mentioned Room 8, a dusty triangular chair set is put into play over Beatles parodies, a distillation of sentimentality and melancholy, where one, as a viewer, is confronted with the cultural staging of what we call fiction, which ties the concept of tragedy to the present day. One experiences how far one is from the Nordic Sturm & Drang's immediacy and originality, and yet the associations here are linked to those fictions, one immediately feels are in motion.

Parallel to the artistic processing of, or confrontation with, mass media constructions, one finds that Jacobi's works in their entirety focus on the absence of presence, characterized by a very immediate presence. The sense of presence also springs from the installations’ character as snapshots, which again leads the thought to the documentary genre.

In Jacobi's universe, emphasized by his own documentary photographs of installations, he subtly points out how documentation is also just part of a construction. The concept of reality is shifted once again. The net tightens, one feels trapped in a labyrinthine network of imprints of imprints of imprints...

In Room 9, to a flute version of Rod Stewart's I am Sailing, one feels tempted to immerse oneself in the dreamy, empty beds. To let oneself drift away and drown in the virtue of escapism. Jacobi seduces, but he makes it interesting by always staying close to the seduction.

Malene la Cour

Jyllandsposten 13.9.1995

Room with Atmosphere

The visual artist Frans Jacobi has created three exciting installations at Stalke Kunsthandel. Through colors, light, and music, the three scenarios are staged, each evoking a specific emotion.

Frans Jacobi: "Let's Get Lost", Stalke Kunsthandel, Vesterbrogade 14 A, Copenhagen. Until October 31.

You’re taken by surprise as soon as you enter, stopped by a brown fabric screen. Behind the screen, a deep voice murmurs indistinctly: "Yesterday." And indeed, it's a feeling of bygone life, in the sense of lost substance, that emerges as you step behind the screen. There, you find an old, dirty table and a matching chair lit by a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. The objects look as if they have sat in an attic for many years, slowly covered in dust and feathers. The brown tone emphasizes a mood of hopeless decay: Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away...

"Yesterday," or rather "Room 8," is one of the three installations currently exhibited by Frans Jacobi at Stalke Kunsthandel. These installations are part of a larger project Jacobi has been working on for the past four years, but they can also be seen as standalone artworks. The series, titled "Let's Get Lost," currently consists of 13 "rooms," three of which—Rooms 8, 9, and 11—are included in this exhibition.

And you do feel lost. It's remarkably easy to get absorbed in this world of extinguished dreams.

The scenario shifts: "Room 11" is defined by a yellow fabric screen—the color of jealousy. Even before entering the room/installation, you're met with a sickly sweet smell. It comes from many shattered perfume bottles in the center of the room. Whether these are gifts from a vanished lover, smashed in frustration, or thrown at an absent presence, is left to speculation.

Behind the yellow screen stands an unmade bed, the pillow missing, tossed to the other side of the room. Traces of a dramatic scene are evident, paradoxically highlighted by the room's emptiness and lack of human presence. The main characters have left the scene, leaving it to the viewer's imagination and associative interpretations.

Lonely Longing

Blue for "blue" (melancholy). A solitary mattress behind a blue screen and a humble flute tune: I'm sailing. Black silhouettes of birds guide the way into the room, adding to an atmosphere of lonely longing. A universe balanced on the edge between dream and reality—perhaps the space where one is almost awake in the middle of the night.

Frans Jacobi deliberately works with storytelling; through the absence of the main character, an idea of them (or him/her) is created. The scenarios remain as traces of memory.

Kristine Kern

Easy to Get Lost

Stalke Kunsthandel, Vesterbrogade 14A, Copenhagen. Tue-Fri 1–5:30 PM, Sat 11 AM–2 PM. Until October 31.

With Let’s Get Lost, Frans Jacobi presents an excellent exhibition at Stalke Kunsthandel. In recent years, Jacobi has worked on a comprehensive series of installations, Rooms, which have been shown in sections at various locations in Denmark and Europe. Rooms 8, 9, and 11 together form Let’s Get Lost.

When one gets lost, one is drawn into Jacobi’s installations, which are melancholic scenographies and mood-saturated tableaux. Visitors step into them and become part of the scenes—captured by the objects in the scenes, particularly through light, smells, and sounds.

The individual Rooms stand alone, strong and isolated, with great sensory appeal. At the same time, one is tempted to link the scenes together into a narrative—here, a story about the stages of passion, longing, and loneliness. The pop music imagery ensures a clear interpretation of emotional states.

Jacobi’s Rooms collectively form a kind of storytelling—a fragmented narrative about a person who is always absent but has left behind speaking and atmosphere-filled traces. A story in which visitors themselves take on a role, as if in a film.

A story whose continuation will hopefully follow not only abroad but also on Danish soil.

Malene Vest Hansen

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