Confrontation Pieces centres around humans encountering a chaotic and complicated world, and art as a tool to find a way in the world – for the artist as well as for the spectator. Elisabeth Toubro returns to her character The Wandering Woman who was also the focal point of the exhibition The Wandering Woman’s Momentum, shown at Galerie Mikael Andersen in 2012.

The works in Confrontation Pieces take the form of five doors. Through the window of these doors the spectator is presented with a view into the world in which The Wandering Woman moves. Next to each door is a hatstand-like sculpture with a ‘backpack’ in the form of a geometric figure hanging from it; a mental backpack of sorts, containing the tools used by The Wandering Woman to navigate herself in the surrounding world.

Confrontation Pieces is very much about art and humans meeting with the surrounding world and with each other. Working with sculpture is a means of understanding that world: “The sculpture is a body. A consciousness, a transformer through which the artist sees, meets and tries to understand the world. The sculpture is the other body standing next to my own. But in this exhibition, I try to become one with the sculpture, to carry it out in the world in order to be directly confronted with ‘institutions’ and places that carry essential meaning for humans: nature, the library, the cemetery, the hospital, the supermarket,” says Elisabeth Toubro.

The Wandering Woman becomes a sculpture and the sculpture becomes human. The works occupy the space to create a dialogue by placing something strange or unexpected in it. This generates a number of questions and sparks an unanticipated dialogue within the space. Elisabeth Toubro says: “In the works The Wandering Woman carries her ‘sculpture-ness’ around to concrete and symbolically laden places. What is she doing with the sculpture there? It is strange, it is grotesque. She forces herself and the sculpture to have something to do with the world, as well as the meeting with the world.” This meeting is pointedly communicated to the spectator through the images showing The Wandering Woman in confrontation with both sculpture and surroundings. 

Photo credits: Jan Søndergaard