Mette Sandfær
Replaced Body Parts

The exhibition is at the ARV.I Studio as part of the satellite exhibition program of Heerz Tooya and is a conclusion of Sandfær's artist residency at ARV.International in Vishovgrad.

I used to say ‘stick your finger in the soil and smell where you are’. Now, the touch of metal. Kin of brick. And paper femorals—are local nails returning smiles of defeat.

The exhibition, titled Replaced Body Parts, by Mette Sandfær, makes you follow a collector’s estranged objecthood in transit toward a totem lane. There is a disobedient ease in Sandfær’s work. Objects refuse to settle into stable identities. Familiar materials, stacked, pole and drift away from their intended functions and begin to occupy a space somewhere between sculpture, leap, and memory. A chair leg becomes structural and absurd at the same time. Fragments lean on each other as if temporarily negotiating how to remain standing. Everyday materials gathered, 3D Kandinsky, flat-out color-coded with a round stem—once bound to human need, flop and extension, now freed, faulty and eel.

Site-responsively, the sculptures allow the palpable front-yard barn to speak and trace the social atmosphere of a place, entering the work as active material. Rather than imposing order onto space, the situated sculptures appear to grow out of small disturbances within it. As subtle shifts in the everyday begins to loosen its own logic, humor emerges: not as decoration or commentary, but as a consequence of things no longer behaving as they should.

The exhibition unfolds through constellations of reused and found materials carrying visible histories of pressure, wear and transformation. Objects restored into coherence, but also held in suspension. As material resistance becomes a poetic strategy, the situated sculptures insist on uncertainty, on skewed balance. We witness forms that seem both vulnerable and stubbornly present. Between order and collapse, the exhibition Replaced Body Parts proposes another kind of attentiveness — one where the skewed logic, sensory and the unstable are allowed to speak before language fully arrives. I can smell again.

- Lars Nordby

Mette Sandfær (b. Denmark) is currently living and working in Bergen, Norway. Holding an MFA at Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Bergen, Norway (2023) and a BA at the Royal Danish Academy, Graphic Design, Copenhagen, Denmark (1990). Her exhibitions include POSERS, Norsk Billedhogger Forening, Oslo, NO (2026); Into The Woods, NAC, LT (2025); Bumpy Ride, Trondhjems Kunstforeningen, NO (2025); Short-time Relations, Tag Team Studio, Bergen, NO (2024); Nudge it, kick it, prod it, push it, Bergen Kunsthall, NO (2023); and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, København, DK (2017 and 2019).

The exhibition is supported by Bergen Kommune, The Association of Norwegian Visual Artists, and Norwegian Association for Craft Artists.