Ribe Domkirkes nye kirkeblad

nr. 1 september - november 2012

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VELKOMMEN TIL ET NYT KIRKEBLAD!

Hej, 

Mit navn er Alexander Tovborg, jeg er billedkunstner og den nye redaktør af Ribe Domkirkes kirkeblad i det kommende år. 

Dette sker i samarbejde med Ribe Domkirke og Ribe Kunstmuseum og er en del af den omfattende kunstudstilling: »Giv os i dag... Når kunsten går i kirke«.  Kunstprojektet »Giv os i dag... Når kunsten går i kirke« er indtil dato det største og mest ambitiøse udstillingsprojekt med fokus på kunsten i kirken. Udstillingen, der går Danmark rundt, vil forsøge at sætte fokus på forholdet mellem kunst og kirke ved at vise de største, mest vellykkede og nytænkende kirkeudsmykninger i nyere tid af både danske og udenlandske hovednavne. 

Udstillingen åbner i Køge på KØS – museum for kunst i det offentlige rum og tager derefter videre til Lemvig på Museet for Religiøs Kunst.  Parallelt med udstillingen er 6 samtidskunstnere blevet spurgt om at udsmykke en kirke hver i Danmark. Som en af de udvalgte kunstnere har jeg fornøjelsen af at arbejde sammen med Danmarks ældste kirke i Ribe. 

Mit bidrag til Ribe Domkirke består i, at jeg har ønsket at være redaktør af domsognets kirkeblad i et år, fra september 2012 til august 2013. Det betyder, at jeg påtager mig alt ansvar for indhold for de 4 numre, der ud- kommer årligt. Jeg har valgt at ændre bladets grafiske udtryk, og du vil i fremtiden kunne se frem til at bladet ændrer sig fra nummer til nummer, både grafisk og i størrelse.  

Ønsket om at blive redaktør er et helhjertet forsøg på at skabe en åben, men også kritisk diskussionsplatform for sogn og menighed. Det er mit ønske at skabe et frirum med kunsten som formidler og åbne for nye måder at se og tale om kirken på, ud fra hvordan den opfattes i år 2012. 

Med tidsrelevante artikler fra både forfattere, politikere og præster samt kunstværker fra samtidskunstnere bliver kirkebladet et åbent vindue direkte til kirkens historie og problemstillinger.  

Det første kirkeblad har jeg givet temaet: »Kirken i dag«, og det er mit håb, at du, når du har læst og kigget kirkebladet igennem, har fået en ny måde at se kirken på. 

I dette blad kan du læse en tekst om emnet af sognepræst Torben Bramming. Teksten tager udgangspunkt i Ribe Domkirke og udfolder samtidig, hvordan Bramming opfatter folkekirken i dag. 

I bladet kan du også læse et essay af Politikens kronikredaktør Christoffer Emil Bruun, der tager læseren med på en indadvendt gåtur fra Fanø til Ribe, en rejse der giver en personlig skildring af Emil Bruuns forhold til kirke og tro. 

Forfatteren Ege Schjørring genskaber i sin kunstneriske tekst kendte historier fra Ribe Domkirke i en ny fortælling, der perspektiverer menneskets forhold til kirken i rum og sted.  

Lektor i dansk litteratur og Grundtvigforsker, Sune Auken fremhæver i sin tekst om kirkens manglende forhold til medierne de overordnede problematikker i kirkens måde at tale til og igennem medierne på.

I kirkebladet vil du også blive introduceret til den norske billedkunstner Torbjørn Rødland, der med sine fotografier stiller skarpt på kirken. I bladet kan du se syv specielt udvalgte værker af Rødland og samtidigt læse en tekst til bedre forståelse af hans værker.  

I kirkebladet kan du derudover finde alle de oplysninger, du normalt finder i bladet om gudstjenester, koncerter, særarrangementer etc. 

Jeg håber, du vil tage godt imod kirkebladet!  

De bedste hilsener, 

Alexander Tovborg   

RIS OG ROS ER VELKOMMEN PÅ: 

Ribesnyekirkeblad(@)gmail.com 

LÆS MERE OM UDSTILLINGEN: 

www.koes.dk 

NÆSTE KIRKEBLAD HAR TEMAET: 

»Ritualer« 

DOWNLOAD KIRKEBLADET SOM PDF VIA KOPENHAGEN.DK: http://kopenhagen.dk/fileadmin/billeder/magazine_upload/2012.08.31_Alexander_Tovborg_kirke/ALEXANDER_TOVBORG_RIBE_DOMKIRKES_NYE_KIRKEBLAD.pdf

Lubok Solo 3

Lubok Solo 3

  Mit 16 schwarz-weißen Originallinolschnitten von Alexander Tovborg Broschur, 

16 Seiten, 32x23,5 cm, 

300 nummerierte Exemplare Erschienen 

10/2011 ISBN 978-3-941601-22-2  

 / www.lubok.de

Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen

'Sacra conversazione'

It is a great pleasure for Galleri Nicolai Wallner to present Sacra Conversazione an exhibition with new works by Alexander Tovborg and Jeppe Hein. 

The exhibition sets up a meeting between two formally very different artists - Tovborg being predominantly a painter whereas Hein works with installation and sculpture. Using simple forms and reflective surfaces Hein's works directly and surprisingly address the physical presence of the viewer and the surrounding space. Tovborg's paintings capture you in quite a different manner through their large scale and vivid imagery. Through his works Tovborg explores spiritual issues drawn from his own personal thoughts and beliefs. 

The title of the exhibition "Sacra Conversazione" refers to a concept of Renaissance painting with religious figures engaged in contemplative conversation. Traditionally this followed a strict set of rules and preformed norms. During the 15th century it gave way to a more intimate and immediate way of depicting the subject – mirroring a change in belief and a more individual approach to religion. 

In the exhibition Hein and Tovborg engage in a dialogue set within the framework of the spiritual. In five large-scale paintings of various sexual encounters in an Arcadian setting, Tovborg depicts the Old Testament's story of Adam and Eve and the fateful moment they decided to eat the forbidden fruit thus gaining knowledge and awareness. Though obviously more abstract and less direct in their approach to the spiritual, Hein's installations also points to a place for spiritual reflection. The immediacy of the works opens up a space for contemplation for the viewer and a possibility of enlightenment. 

We are happy to welcome you in the gallery. 

With kind regards, 
Galleri Nicolai Wallner

Installationsbilleder:

Udstillingen vises fra den 13. April til den 26. Maj 2012 

/www.nicolaiwallner.com

Brand New Gallery, Milan. Italy

'Giverny'

 It was only when Eve and the young stranger had exhausted the Kama Sutra (was that last position Splitting the Bamboo, or the Congress of the Cow?) that she realized what it was she really wanted. As the guard came running over the Japanese bridge, the beam of his flashlight stabbing wildly at the undergrowth, she took the stranger by the hand, helped him down from the lily pad, and began to wade with him through the still waters of the pond towards the house. She had been in the garden for only a few short hours, but she felt that it was somehow part of her, as though it had grown, in all its florid majesty, from the shadowy cleft between her legs. Eve tapped her fingertips against the damp triangle of her pubic hair. It yielded fast and firm, like keys on a computer keyboard; bouncing back up the moment she released the pressure. They were almost at the house now. On the other side of the pond, the guard blundered and swore through the warm Normandy night.

         Every December, during her Christmas shopping expedition to the mall to buy presents for her husband and her children, Eve would pick up a calendar from Barnes and Noble. Although she would sometimes make a small, internal pretense of considering her options (perhaps this time she really would go for ‘The Native American Spirit’, or even ‘Twelve Baby Owls’), she knew in her heart that she would return home, as always, with ‘Claude Monet: Impressionist Master’, and consider it fifteen dollars well spent. On the first day of January, she would hang the new calendar on the wall of her neat suburban kitchen, taking care not to peek at which paintings illustrated the months to come. Eve did not, as a rule, like surprises, preferring the dim, comforting clairvoyance conferred by a life of domestic routine, but she welcomed the soft throb of unknowing that built inside her every four weeks, as she waited for the moment when ‘Impression, Sunrise’ transformed into ‘Haystack, Sunset’, or the detergent ad freshness of ‘Woman With a Parasol’ gave way to the jeweled and oily undertow of the Munich ‘Nymphéas’.

Monet (she pronounced it ‘Mow Nay’) had been Eve’s favourite painter since High School, where her art teacher Mr. Rogacz had shown her ‘Bridge Over a Pond of Water-lilies’ in a heavy hardback catalogue published by the Metropolitan Museum. The last time she had seen Mr. Rogacz was at her senior prom. That night, while her classmates gathered on the athletics field to watch the fireworks bloom and clatter against the black Wyoming skies, he stroked her to her first orgasm behind the locked door of the school’s painting studio, pushing her hands away with what felt like infinite gentleness each time she scrabbled at the hard ridge of his cock. Eve did not tell anybody about this encounter – not the new friends she made at secretarial college, not the handsome, kind, and unimaginative man who soon became her husband, and certainly not her two teenaged daughters, although the three of them discussed sex (or as the girls called it, ‘fucking’) with what she considered to be a frank and healthy openness. It wasn’t that Eve regretted those few short minutes she’d spent bucking wetly against her teacher’s fingers, only that she had come to realise that they would have to last her a lifetime, and to speak of them, to turn a memory into language, risked its diminishment. And so each January she pinned up a new Monet calendar, and let his paintings hang silently over another year.

        

A few days after her youngest daughter left for college, Eve’s husband died of a heart attack. She had loved him deeply, and mourned his sudden and irretrievable absence, but even in her grief she recognized that whatever hidden force it was that governed the world’s affairs (she could not conceive, she told her friends, of there being ‘nothing bigger than me’) had seen fit to set her on an unfamiliar path. It was two years later, sitting at her kitchen table with her laptop, that she chanced across a banner ad for Fallen Eden: ‘The Internet Chatroom For Educated People, Where You’re Erotic Fantasies Run Free’. Eve glanced up at her calendar, entered the site, registered the screen-name XLilithX (Lilith and Lilith69 had already been taken) and waited for the first chat window to appear. It did not take long.

‘A/S/L?’ This was her suitor, screen-name Billionaire_Slit_Licker

          ‘A/S/L?’

         ‘Age/Sex/Location?’

Eve paused. It might be fun to tell the truth, at least at first.

‘41/F/Wyoming. U?’

The window remained empty for what felt like forever. Eve was about to log out when a block of text flashed up on her screen.

         ‘Honourable lady, I am a male, 18 years of age, living in the city of Bangalore. My mother knows me as Aadesh, and my good friends in America call me Adam, but here I am Billionaire_Slit_Licker, big boss and number one lover man of Fallen Eden. It is my particular delight to take a woman’s most precious reveries, her most deeply buried fantasies, and to help them flower into beautiful reality’.

Eve laughed. This wasn’t how she’d imagined things would go at all.

‘C’mon kid, aren’t you a little young for me?’

‘Here there is no age. No male or female. No location. Only the fulfillment of desire’

‘OK, then, what’s your fantasy, big boss?’

‘My dear Eve, I am but a simple facilitator. Please be so good as to check your inbox’.

         Eve clicked nervously on her email. Plane tickets to Paris. A hotel reservation in Giverny. All in her name. She returned to the chat window. Billionaire_Slit_Licker had already typed in a new block of text.

         ‘Do not be alarmed, honourable lady. There are some things that are bigger than all of us’.

         Eve stared at the screen. Finally she typed ‘But how did you pay for all this?’

         ‘My dear Eve, didn’t I tell you that I am a billionaire? ;)’

* * *

        

Eve and Aardesh arrived at the house.

         ‘I am sorry to report the door is locked’ said Aardesh ‘and in my nakedness I cannot be carrying a key. No pockets you see.’

         ‘No problem, lover man’ said Eve. She tapped imperceptibly on the swell of her groin, four short strokes. The door opened. ‘This way’. She led Aardesh through the Blue Sitting Room, across the cold flagstones of the Pantry and into the Studio. She stopped. ‘This is it. This is where it ends’.

         Aardesh looked around. A large window. A bank of red radiators. Reproduction canvases hung three deep on the high yellow walls.

         ‘The Studio. Mr. Rogacz. Of course’. His elegant brown fingers smoothed her breasts, moving down past her belly towards her wetness.

         ‘No. Not like that. Here’. Eve took his cock in her hand, and stepped backwards, her body now out of his reach. She glanced at him. He was so very young and perfect. So very hot and hard beneath her touch.

         ‘Aardesh, we were never in Monet’s Garden. The man who painted those paintings did not see the bridge as we saw it. He did not see the same lilies, or the same reflections in the pond’. She moved her hand more quickly, fingers fluttering over his shaft. ‘Claude Monet was Aphakic. He could see ultraviolet light’. Aardesh was breathing heavily. She could feel him begin to tense. ‘So you see, my Billionaire_Slit_Licker, this must be somewhere else’. Eve saw the window glare with what might have been a torch beam. It was almost over now. ‘This was our invention. This was our garden, dear Adam’. The boy cried out, his body jack-knifing in pleasure, coming for the final time.

 

         From somewhere there came a tapping, fast and loud. An entry bid, or an exit. An advance, or a retreat. Eve looked at the window, expecting to see the guard. There was nothing there, or almost nothing.  A rectangle of white light, tinged blue at its edges. A calendar square. A new and empty day. 

By Tom Morton

Installationsbilleder:

Udstillingen vises fra den 1. marts til den 4. april 2012
 / www.brandnew-gallery.com

A catalogue was published in concomitance with the exhibition Alexander Tovborg, Giverny at Brand New Gallery, Milan, 1 March-4 April 2012   © Brand New Gallery 2012 Pages 48, cm. 22x16.5, hardcover, Illustrations 21

Museet for Religiøs Kunst, Lemvig

'Tre'

I udstillingens titel TRE ligger blandt andet en henvisning til den kristne kunsts tredelte altertavler, det såkaldte triptykon, hvis formsprog Alexander Tovborg approprierer og lader gå igen i alle værker i udstillingen i form af malerier, skulpturer, tekstilkunst og tegninger.

Værkerne fungerer dog ikke selv som kirkekunst, men undersøger i stedet den iscenesættelse, der omgiver kirkekunsten, og de betydninger, der opstår i mødet med den. Dette tydeliggøres ved på Museet for Religiøs Kunst at skabe en ophængning af værkerne, som efterligner iscenesættelsen af triptykonet i det traditionelle kirkerum.

Udstillingens titel refererer desuden til tretallets universelle betydning som symbol for verdens tresidige natur, herunder i relation til mennesket som ånd, sjæl og legeme; fødsel, liv og død; fortid, nutid og fremtid, samt til tretallets dominans i verdens religioner. Tovborg forsøger at legemliggøre og konkretisere disse fænomener gennem det, som han kalder for den ”arketypiske Treenighed”, og som i hans kunst er personificeret i figurerne ”Skaberen”, ”Formidleren” og "Moralen".

Med disse tre figurer sætter udstillingen fokus på kulturel mangfoldighed ved at bevæge sig ud over én bestemt religiøs kontekst og i stedet tematisere og undersøge alle religioners grundbegreber – ud fra Tovborgs egen forståelse af religioner som noget, der har et fælles udgangspunkt, men som gennem tiderne er blevet formet på adskillige måder af forskellige folkeslag og kulturer.

Alexander Tovborgs værker åbner for debat om såvel begrebet ”religion” som om den konventionelt religiøst inspirerede kunst ved i deres formsprog og indhold at kortlægge lighedstrækkene mellem flere forskellige religioner såsom kristendom, nordisk mytologi, Østens filosofi og ”primitiv” åndetro. Værkerne skildrer dermed forskellige tids- perioders og kulturers religionsdyrkelse, men minder os samtidig også om, at vi lever i en global verden, og at det moderne menneskes religiøsitet ofte er påvirket af flere religionsformer.

Af Krestina Skirl

Installationsbilleder:

Udstillingen vises fra den 27. februar til den 3. april 2011
 / www.mfrk.dk

Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen

'New Eternity'

It is a great pleasure for Galleri Nicolai Wallner to present New Eternity, with new works by Alexander Tovborg (b. 1983). This is our first exhibition with Alexander Tovborg who graduated from the Royal 

Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in May 2010.

Tovborg explores different genres of art including painting, drawing, sculpture, and performance. He creates compelling figurative and metaphysical imagery drawn from his own personal beliefs and combined with elements that seem to connect to a more general cultural subconscious. Tovborg seems especially to find a sincere and genuine expression in religious and spiritual art that he transforms into paintings and sculptures – creating his own myths in process.

For this exhibition Tovborg has reconstructed the gallery as a spiritual landscape and divided it into the Market Place, the Temple, and Paradise - with each area having its own colour and organizing principle. A group of arch types identified as the Creator, the Moral, the Communicator, and the Believer inhabit his works. According to the artist the interaction between these figures constitutes the structural principle of religion and they appear in various incarnations throughout the exhibition.

Very adapt in different techniques and media, Tovborg often blends them in one work employing acrylic, gold metal leaf, collage in both sculpture and painting. The same all embracing approach appear in how the palette of the exhibition is used; the black, red, green, and gold appear rather differently in each work from the nearly monochrome to the visually arresting polychrome. Through split perspectives and by multiplying the motif into a myriad of facets, Tovborg creates a panoptic view over actual and virtual spaces. A lyrical, yearning world that appears either glowing with colours or shrouded by thin layers of pigment.

The exhibition New Eternity testifies to the highly charged relationship between visuality and spirituality. The art of believing or conversely to believe in art is at stake. Tovborg’s paintings and 

sculptures attempt to give temporary forms to the unimaginable.

We are very pleased and honoured to be able to introduce the works of this exciting young artist to a wider public and happy to welcome you in the gallery.

With kind regards,

Galleri Nicolai Wallner

Installationsbilleder:

Udstillingen vises fra den 2. september til den 30. oktober 2010 

/www.nicolaiwallner.com