Opening: 5-7 pm on Friday, 19 November at The Women’s Building, Niels Hemmingsens Gade 8-10.

Opening November 19th, the exhibition presents a new body of work, comprising a video essay and a large-scale collage from a  broader series entitled “How to Imagine the Tropicalia as Monumental”. The exhibition engages with the narrative of Alberta Viola Roberts and Victor Cornelius, who were taken as children from the Danish West Indies to be displayed in the 1905 colonial exhibition at Tivoli Gardens, organized by Emma Gad, founder of the Women’s Building.

With this intervention in ARIEL’s space, Belle explores how unremembered histories can be inscribed in bodies, paper, landscapes, seascapes, and the built environment. Working with the gaps in knowledge about the lives of the two children before they were taken to Denmark, the video employs critical fabulation to wonder about Alberta and Victor’s childhood memories on the Danish West Indies. Shot in St. Croix, the work explores traces of history lodged in the landscape to surface the continual haunting of past presences on the island. Turning away from the violence of archival records, the video is conceived as an offering to Alberta and Victor, an attempt to create a space of care and regard for the memories of their early life.

Covering part of the exhibition space, Belle’s collage work explores the gesture of assembling and reconfiguring material fragments of history to imagine new conceptions of time, space and self. Originating in a set of paper previously damaged by a storm, the piece explores and resignifies the memory of devastation lodged in the material to “transgress temporal limitations, cross infinite distances, and invent multiple horizons”. In layering multiple elements pulled from the artist’s vocabulary, the piece speaks to how the colonial past and present are not separate but juxtaposed, entangled and fluid.

Together, this new body of work extends Belle’s counter-archival practice to explore how to summon a different kind of knowledge from fragments and traces of history. The exhibition offers a room for spatial and temporal collapse— what the artist terms a space of “pastpresentfuture”—, where different spaces and times touch, muddle and speak to one another, surfacing unremembered histories and their unresolved unfolding.

For more information see link.

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