Totem
Cathrine Raben Davidsen X Royal Copenhagen
Opening February 7th, 2019, Danish visual artist Cathrine Raben Davidsen is presenting her new solo exhibition Totem in the recently refurbished Royal Copenhagen flagship store at Amagertorv in Copenhagen. Totem is a product of Raben Davidsen’s two-year artistic collaboration with Royal Copenhagen. Staged as a total installation the exhibition presents a completely new body of work consisting of ceramics, drawings, paintings and an animation film, that are thematically inspired by prehistoric ceramics, animistic spirituality and totemism.
The notion of transformation is a recurring concept in Raben Davidsen’s recent work. She sees the process of transformation as a basic condition of humanity – a continuum that connects us constantly and at multiple levels with our surrounding environments. What particularly interests Raben Davidsen is how we perceive and understand mankind’s relationship with nature and the spiritual world, drawing from how these relations are embedded in the ancient traditions of animistic religion. Animism is the belief that everything in nature, both the organic and the inorganic, has a soul in the same way as human beings. Thus, man can communicate with the contemplated nature and cultivate it. Among the animistic believers a totem is a worship that aims to gather and strengthen the group’s identity and cohesion.
By intuitively combining disparate pieces of knowledge taken from ritual practices, animistic belief systems, scientific research, anthropology, philosophy, etc. Cathrine Raben Davidsen explores the holistic connections having shaped relations of belief for millennia. Questioning the dualisms between nature and culture, physical and metaphysical, material and spiritual, real versus fiction, she asks how these relations can be examined anew in the modern society of our time.
Royal Copenhagen, Amagertorv 6, Copenhagen
February 8th – March 31th, 2019