Solo show at ISCP
New York City, 2023

HD video, ceramics, found wood, thread, metal bolts

Spindle City takes the textile industry as a context from which to examine the workings and impact of growth economies. It is based on the artist’s research in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and Lowell, Massachusetts, major hubs of industrial cotton production in the United States, and draws on the artist’s background growing up in a Danish town founded as a manufacturing center for textiles. 

The exhibition features a video essay, Spindle City, and a series of sculptures made of ceramic, wood, metal, and thread. The circuit is a recurring motif: from the fiber that winds through sculptures that evoke industrial looms, to the animated lines of the video, which symbolically trace a critical path through legacies of capitalism, colonialism, slavery, and the welfare state. 

In the artist’s words, “this series investigates and questions the legacy of industrialization, especially the Western mindset that worships the machine and lets nothing stand in the way of economic growth. It asks us to imagine ways of balancing technological development with a deeper attention to nature and our own capacity for sensitivity.”

Exhibition curator Media Farzin states, “Spindle City grounds us within the vistas and systems we have inherited from industrial capitalism. It proposes small-scale gestures of agency and responsibility within these received forms. It gestures towards a more thoughtful understanding of global citizenship, social forms organized around the mutual needs of human bodies, communities, and ecologies.”