Just because it’s fake, doesn’t mean I don’t feel it!
Stockholm, 3rd june, 2022.


The new arrival in Nice, his eye on the thermometer,
If, scorning the danger of catching a cold, he will wear linen;
To give an overcoat to someone who winters at Nice
Is like giving:
-an emetic to the novice at sea,
just as the hurricane stretches the sail to breaking point;
- When a lecturer begins, to whoever’s listning,
a narcotic.
To he who takes from a book
An idyllic dried flower, august and venerable, a flatting hammer;
Raymond Roussel, 1932.


proudly presents the new exhibition Just because it’s fake, doesn’t mean I don’t feel it, a pseudo-morphological group exhibition comprised of contributions from Martin Brandt, Ivan Cheng, Max Glader, David Grønlykke, Anton Halla, Joke Robaard, Heraldo Szeezmann & Johannes Zacharias.
Integral to the effort and the affinity thereof, is the equivocal distinction between the tactility embedded within the works and the respective critical make-up of these as constituted by the artists in their works’ particular conceptions. Just because it’s fake, doesn’t mean I don’t feel it is truly an effort meant to be felt and meant to be sensed. Whether that is by walking along the passages drawn up by the works, or by wandering along the lines of fight composed by the conceptual ambiance of the singular pieces and in the cross-pollination happing between the works.
What happens, then, when the works are placed behind a screen and no such entrances seem possible? When the cutting smell of vinegar originating from Anton Halla’s antique roman coin cleaning vessel does not fuse with the freshly sprayed graffiti written upon the plywood wall. Or rather the infusion is happening, but the visitor is excluded from the formation of this network’s conception? And what appears as watermarks trickling down obstructing the gaze is making the visitor wonder: “Is that shirt drenched in sweat, or am I being deceived?”.
A notion of nichtwahrnehmung, un-noticing-ness, or of second-guessing oneself, is a notion that has become indigenous to viewing art during recent years as art has evermore transposed itself out of the exhibition spaces and into our homes and hands in our personal digital-spheres. Here we find ourselves with only minuscule ability to asses the tactility, as works of art are being scaled down into hand-held formats, and the material-lists can only be found while scrolling away from the work itself as whole exhibitions are transmuted in an act of extreme image-making.

Standing before the windows of Just because it’s fake, doesn’t mean I don’t feel it one might be hoaxed into believing that the exhibition is something flat, and that both the inception and resolution of the works might wholly be found in that slender space that is the glass of the display.
Today glass panels and their frames have an embedded functionality that can alchemize three-dimensional spaces into sceneries of photography but even more significant, this construction is able to turn portraits of consumer goods into commodities materializing in cardboard boxes upon doorsteps. This is a state of normality that we incidentally are taking for granted but is in fact significant. Retrospectively one might be amazed at how rapidly our cognitive ability to recognize representational imagery as placeholders for obtainable consumer goods has changed even within the last 10 years.
It has recently been speculated that the cave paintings of Lacroix were intended as a proto-cinematic center that a neolithic hunter-gatherer society would impact with movement utilizing flickering lights upon the imagery. This recent interpretation might simply be a 21st-century mind slowly becoming incapable of believing that observing a still-image for long could be stimulating, and that there simply must have been a need for movement in the imagery, i.e., that this fake representation of their contemporary wildlife could possibly be felt, and not limited thereto.
Mads B. Sørensen

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