This winter, Kunstnernes Hus has the pleasure of presenting the international group show Holding Pattern. What are the choreographies in which our lives are held and what rhythms, or algorithms, drive these? How do these play out in historical, political and cultural terms? And can art, literature, filmmaking, or music draw them out, make them visible, legible, audible, or even contestable? These are some of the themes and questions that the exhibition will explore.
Photo from Kunstnernes Hus
Holding Pattern is the English term for the tactic air traffic controllers use to keep several planes orbiting above a busy airport without crashing. What emerges from this symbolic scenario is the motif of remote control, of skill and mastery; a sense of human destinies being bound up in the circuits of technology; of anticipation and anxiety, danger and salvation (being ‘brought in safely’); and, most tellingly, of geometry, aesthetics and even beauty: from Plato to Dante and beyond, the universe has been understood in terms of circles, just as for Apelles, Giotto and others the holy grail of art has been to draw a perfect one.
