Sabine Wedege
Pagan Geopolitics

“Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks,” claimed Karl Marx in Capital. A vampire, a mosquito, a bloodsucker, a consumer, a capitalist – at-the-border, behind-the-border, territories, power, war, colonialism, agriculture, sacrifices, survival. Pagan Geopolitics plays with the idea of a new term for an understanding of how countries produce and trade and how deep-rooted paganism is in relation to this, to everyday life, worldview, and capitalism – passed down from our ancestors to us, from generation to generation, from local production to mass production. The importance in peasant culture was to ensure a good harvest, and the animals were generally healthy- to protect from evil – with forbidden pagan rituals. An awareness of what materials nature offers, in relation to where you are, inside borders, inside the bureaucracy, inside totalitarianism… where the human finally can connect to the cycle of life and improve the relationship with nature, once again, sucking out all the nutrition, getting forced into the trade of the good natural resources, and everyone standing like Pavlov’s dogs, and wants to buy that piece of land. Mother Nature’s body once again got sold for copper, nickel, and zinc, a living currency with a libidinal economy – as Silvia Federici mentions in Caliban and the Witch, “The body has been for woman in capitalist society what the factory has been for male waged workers.”

It’s like winning on a slot machine! Good luck.

Sabine Wedege (b. 1993, Denmark) lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark, and holds an MFA from Jutland Art Academy in Aarhus, Denmark, and the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, Serbia. Attended The Writing School in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland (The publisher Gladiator), the educational curator program WHAT COULD/SHOULD CURATING DO? in Belgrade, Serbia, Frieze New Writers Programme at Bergen Kunsthall, and a certificate student and researcher at The New Centre for Research & Practice in Art & Curatorial Practice, Seattle, USA. Shown works, i.a., Kunsthal Aarhus and Kunsthal Kongegaarden in Denmark and Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, Serbia. She is also the founder and curator at the platform RUM два, which tries to create a more direct connection between the Nordic and the Balkans art scene.

Her interdisciplinary practice intertwines research and storytelling, primarily through sculpture as well as text, sound, and video – based on various references, including esotericism, folklore, paganism, feminism, and ecology. The works merge associations via connections found in history to our present, which results in new constellations. www.sabinewedege.com

The exhibition and residency are supported by the Danish Arts Foundation. Thanks to Tequila Bar Fnky Mnky.