Cleaning in progress: the line between art and life

Ulvi Haagensen

This exposition combines image, text, and video to provide an overview of my artistic research, which focuses on the embodied experience of art-making in relation to the everyday. Equipped with the notions of a line and a circle, I explore the connections and overlaps between art and life through a multi-disciplinary art practice that combines installation, sculpture, drawing, performance, and video, and merges this with everyday experiences, mainly cleaning, one of the more mundane aspects of everyday life. In this work, I am accompanied by three imaginary friends, who are also artists. We find ourselves constantly crossing the lines between art, art-making, and everyday life as we move between our roles and various places of work, such as home, university, library, and studio. We dip into the everyday for materials, tools, and techniques, and work in the manner of a bricoleuse, using a ‘make do’ approach and ‘what is at hand’. Along the way, we ponder the specialness of art, especially from the perspective of an artist for whom art and art-making are a part of the everyday and therefore quite un-special. As we puzzle over the distinctions of whether something is practical or impractical, useful or useless, art or non-art, mundane or special, we end up blurring the borders to discover an approach that attempts to dispense with the idea of boundaries and binaries altogether.

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Ulvi Haagensen - Cleaning in progress: the line between art and life - 2021