Bad Timing – or How to Write History Without Objects is based on the historical exhibition Women Artists’ Retrospective Exhibition from 1920, where 200 female artists (both living and dead) exhibited almost 700 works at Den Frie. This historical moment becomes an occasion to examine how artists, then as well as today, are active writers of their own and our common art history.
Today, many of the works from the 1920 exhibition are unknown or lost. The same applies to the stories of many of the women who created works for the exhibition. Bad Timing investigates how it can be possible to work with this material and historical absence. How can this absence take shape and become registrable? For the exhibition this void is materialized through large tableaux of new works by prominent contemporary artists, who work to make absence physical in very different ways.
The exhibition is curated by Anna Weile Kjærs as a part of the PhD project Wormholes at Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art and University of Copenhagen, Department of Art and Cultural studies. The PhD scholarship is financed by Novo Nordic Foundation.
