MAZE – Potential Archives, Fotografisk Center, – March 24th – May 21st, 2023.

In the exhibition MAZE – Potential Archives Fryd Frydendahl has explored various archives and collections. Frydendahl has drawn up the works by interpreting material from archives and collec­tions by way of her own distinctive imagination.
 

The works are visual references that investigate and pay tribute to the complex systems found in archives and collections – from the classification system in libraries to personal collections or histo­rical archives – digital as well as physical. The exhibition includes works where Frydendahl has interpreted books from Hillerød Library in connection with the exhibition LÅNERKORT (LIBRARY TICKET) at Vandrehallen Kunsthal (2022). In MAZE – Potential Archives Frydendahl works further with strands from the fascination with human tendencies and elaborates by exploring a variety of archives and collections. Frydendahl forms her own archive by creating new visual references through her works and demonstrates a clear fascination with human curiosity and the need for systems. The strands from this fascination result in an explosion of references and questions.
 

In the story The Library of Babel by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges he describes a fictive and endless library where all that can be written has already been written – emphasi­sing that the archives and collections of reality will never be completed, since infinity is only potential, and not achieved. Frydendahl’s works explore this principle, preparing the way for eternal develop­ment – circularity – and at the same time question the idea of originality. How can something original arise in a potentially endless web of references? And how do references arise in a potentially infinite archive of information?
 

The exhibition space has been transformed into a maze consisting of three layers that categorise the works into a factual, a metaphysical and a fictional level. The three layers have pro­vided a working method for an overview of the infinite source material. The exhibition elucidates and explores the human fascination with and need to organise and systematise the incompre­hen­sible in order to store, remember and archive objects and knowledge. All the strange and subtle divisions and subdivisions into indices and categories, classification systems and detailed files that someone has sat and conceived can seem wonderfully cryptic and easy to become lost in, like a human mind, like a MAZE. 

https://fotografiskcenter.dk/en/exhibition/fryd-frydendahl-maze-potential-archives