Marte Eknaes. Formal economy

Formal Economy presents sculptural works, drawings and collages as visual narratives and fictional landscapes, within chapters on public sphere, surface, flexibility, waste and water world hedonism.

Sculptures and drawings get placed back into the urban environment which they derive from, creating a heightened / saturated version of the familiar public sphere. Interspersed with exhibition documentation, the line between carefully constructed installations and the everyday environment is blurred.

The other topics each have a dedicated building in the form of architectural models and plans, as appropriations or parodies. These provide both a site and a framework, which is then occupied and filled, or expanded and broken through images and text. Behind the surface the work has a deeper content, and beyond the plinth there is a wider context for a fictional existence on a different scale.

Throughout the book the works take on roles of urban furniture, architectural fragments, back drops, buildings and characters in a fluid environment where in the end they are also just materials in our ongoing cycle of consumption and waste.

Formal Economy is developed with Karl Kolbitz and designed by HIT studio in Berlin. With selected texts by Charlotte Posenenske, Sam Jacob, Lina Bo Bardi, Alexander Kluge/Joseph Vogl, Suburban Lawns, Pablo Rüdiger S. de Erice, Linus Elmes, and the artist's collaborative writing with Nicolau Vergueiro.