Katrine Skovsgaard

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About

Studio Kat Art
Raadvad 40
DK - 2800 Lyngby
DENMARK
+44 (0)7 30 81 61 981
kat@katrineskovsgaard.net

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Hi, I’m Kat! Who are you?
 
I’m an artist, co-creator, workshop facilitator and collaborator.
 
I thrive on, and am inspired by, dancing and radical self-care. My acts of resistance include hand-holding, public pain-painting, mirroring practices and reclaiming institutionalised narratives of illness. I enjoy taking things outside the context where they, normatively speaking, belong. 
 
What do you share with others and how? What would you hesitate to share?
 
I’m interested in the space between us, how we share, and how we often don’t. My practice investigates ways to reveal subjective sensory experience, especially those of a shameful or overlooked nature.  
 
Eg. The project, (I), focuses on pain as shared identity and generator of images. I facilitated an artistic process of co-creation with a group of people with chronic pain. I interviewed and photographed them in their homes and printed black/white portraits of them on silk fabric in life-size, ratio 1:1. Through exercises and workshops, the portrayed persons found and painted a free representation of their pain directly onto their own portrait. The work also includes process videos and workshops where audience at the exhibition can try exercises from the project.
 
This sparked conversations, intimate moments, sharing, and most importantly, the feeling of being safe to do so. The work instigated conversations I’d never had before; the hesitancy I felt about sharing, when faced head-on, became a catalyser for not only my own but for many other people’s sharing stories of vulnerability.

When and where do you feel safe to share?
 
I currently explore how we can provide embodied safety for each other, and what that might look like, emotionally as well as physically. Collectivising around the tough aspects 
of being human, and building our capacity to be present with our experience is an important and revolutionary practice that our current systems and structures do not support. We need to re-establish the trust that our re-enactments of capitalism have dissolved; we need to ask questions and practice ways of being in the world, that challenge the inherent hierarchies and the memes we live by. We need to re-learn interdependency and trust in each other.

How can we start to think about doing this?

CV

Education

I am currently working and living in London, UK, where I study at Royal College of Art - MA Contemporary Art Practice - Public Sphere.

I am educated from Funen Art Academy in 2010-2016. I was a member of the school board in 2015-2016.

My graduation project (I) was a participatory art process of co-creation where I photographed people with chronic pain in their own environment. The portraits were printed on silk in scale 1:1. The portrayed persons then painted a representation of their pain on their own portrait. The work also includes process videos by professional film photographers; Engsig Productions and INcaseOf, and a workshop where audience at the exhibition can try exercises from the project.

Ongoing - exhibition and curation

In 2020, I am exhibiting the piece Release - Grid at the exhibition The Language Hospital at Sorø Art Museum, Denmark. The exhibition examines what language does to the body through a meeting between art, poetry, hospital equipment and the museum collection; how illness is articulated, how diagnoses are established and how normality is defined. The exhibition will later travel to be shown at Medical Museum in Copenhagen.

Release has been shown in different constellations throughout 2019; at at Copenhagen Art Week, at The Final Exhibition, Kuldiga Art Hall in Latvia, BKF in Copenhagen, and in the publication Der Grief Guest-Room curated by Dominic Bell, Germany.

I am co-curating the exhibition Lights, Camera, Reaction! At C4 Project Space in late 2020, a group exhibition that is the last of a series of exhibitions curated for c4 projects, all themed around intimacy and the private. I will be curating together with Rikke Ehlers, Stine Gro and Karin Hald, and we will be making a publication with the publishing house Gestus. We have invited artists Yazan Khalili (PL), Marijn Kuijper (NL), Diana Lindbjerg (NO) and Ebbe Stub Wittrup to take part in the exhibition.

Previous

In 2018 I exhibited at the Psychiatric Museum in Middelfart with the project ’Headscapes’, a body of work made in co-creation with people who all have experiences with mental illness. The people in the project paint a free representation of their mind on lenticular portraits, where the painting of the mind shifts between being in and out of focus. The piece was accompanied by a workshop where participants could visualise how they felt.

I contributed to the May publication of ’The Year’, a photographic portrait series of Copenhagen published by Blankt Papir. Every month of 2018, Copenhagen was portrayed by a handful of photographers and the images were collected in a photobook portraying that month. By the end of the year there was a collection of 12 books showing the passage of time in Copenhagen. The books can be seen and bought at Fotografisk Center, Bladr, Butikken and NW Gallery

Prizes and grants

I am grateful for the support I have received in 2019 from the Danish Arts Foundation, Beckett Foundation, Merchant L.F. Foght’s Foundation, Augustinus Foundation, Knud Højgaard’s Foundation, and William Demant Foundation.

In 2017 I was selected for Sven Dalsgaards Grant for young experimental artists.

In 2016 I received the 15th of June Foundations Honorary Prize for the project which was judged one of the three best graduation projects from the Danish art academies in 2016. I continue to work with chronic pain and the methods from the production of (I) have been further developed to include a workshop in pain management which is offered to hospitals and municipalities in parallel with my own artistic production.

Education

2019–21

2010–16

Internships, residencies, summer schools, etc.

2018-19

2017

2016

2015

2013-15

2012

2009–10

2008–09

Prizes and awards

2017

2016

2009

Censored exhibitions

2017

2016

2015

2013

  • Nordjysk Censureret 2013, Dronninglund Art Centre, DK

2011

  • Nordjysk Censureret 2011, Dronninglund Art Centre, DK

2009

  • Nordjysk Censureret 2009, Dronninglund Art Centre, DK
  • Student Exhibition, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, AU
  • Pinhole Photography, 6Sixty9Nine Smith Street Gallery, Melbourne, AU

Solo and duo exhibitions

2018

2017

2014

Other exhibitions

2019

2017

2016

2015

2014

  • Art Cinema 3, Habitat, Lahnsgade 48, Odense, DK
  • Habitat Art Café 4 (performance), Habitat, Lahnsgade 48, Odense, DK
  • Habitat Art Café 3 (exhibition), Habitat, Lahnsgade 48, Odense, DK
  • Art Cinema 1, Habitat, Lahnsgade 48, Odense, DK
  • Habitat Art Café 2 (poetry), Habitat, Lahnsgade 48, Odense, DK

2013

2012

  • Fototrienale.dk - The Good Life, Your Way Travels, Brandts, Odense, DK
  • School Show 2nd edition, Pantheonsgade 2-4, Odense, DK
  • 1 Minute – A Matter of Time, FAA Project Room, Funen Art Academy, DK

2011

  • The Concerned Photographer, Day of Photography, the Museum of Photographic Art, Brandts, DK
  • 1st Annual School Show 2011, Pantheonsgade 2-4, Odense, DK

Publications

2019

2018

The Year, May, a photographic portrait series of Copenhagen published by Blankt Papir

2016

2015

  • Camera Obscura Workshop Latvia ISSP 1-10th Aug 2015, published by Takashi Homma, Japan
  • More Than Enough, self-published zine in collaboration with Zoe Kreye, Catherine Grau, Cimmaron Knight, Bogdan Cheta og Luke Parnell, Canada
  • Production><Publication, unique publication, Habitat, ISBN 978-87-998123-0-1, DK

2014

Board and other positions

2015–16

2015

  • Co-founder of the publishing house Habitat

2013

Grants

2019

2017

2016–17

2016

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