With Profane Theatre – The Trilogy, part 2-3 Søren Jensen finishes the story that began with Profane Theatre – The Hunter and Animals in the Woods in 2013. The new exhibition consists of an installation with costumes, theatre props, word signs and two video works.  Søren Jensen uses a visual language of simplistic staging where stereotypes and caricatured roles create a fundamental narrative. In this humorous and almost naïve simplification there lies hidden a contemplation, causing the everyday to seem strange, and the obvious unfamiliar.

In its presentation of ’ordinary’ objects, the installation comprises references to ethnographic collections; where cultural artefacts are fictionalised as a scenographical stage set. Profane Theatre – The Trilogy, part 2-3 is concerned with the spectacle that things become part of when removed from their usual contexts and placed into a new. Through this staging the profane objects, paradoxically, become almost sacred and the everyday takes the form of performance or ritual.

The video works in the exhibition returns to many of the same scenes and characters as Profane Theatre – The Hunter and Animals in the Woods. The Miracle tells the story of a girl who lives in a small house by the church along with her father, The Hunter. The Girl is deaf, but can miraculously hear a rubber bell when The Bell Ringer rings it from the the church tower.

The Thief concerns The Thief, who is the same character as The Bell Ringer from The Miracle. He arrives in The Big City with his Dog (who also featured in The Hunter and Animals in the Woods). They bring All Sorts of Things with them in a big sack, but are robbed on the way by The High Dignitaries and are forced to leave The Big City without All Sorts of Things.  The video works centre around folklore and fairy tale as narratives on how stereotyped roles and meaning is established and traded between people. The Girl, The Hunter and The Thief are more archetypes than people. Thus, they act as representatives for those roles we, as citizens, assume in the different situations of everyday life.

In connection with the opening Søren Jensen will be releasing his latest book Mørtelhoveder i fynske kirker (Eng.: Mortar Heads in the Churches of Funen) published by Space Poetry.

Søren Jensen (b. 1957) was educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1986. His works are represented in the collections of The National Gallery of Denmark, Malmö Museum, The National Museum of Photography, Arken and Trapholt Museum of Modern Art and Design.

Photo credits: Jan Søndergaard