Nina Beier
Old Friends
February 21-May 9, 2026
Opening:February 21, 2026 6-9pm

The dadaists created the first readymades in the early 20th century. A now ubiquitous but at the time revolutionary nose thumbing of the artistic establishment. They antagonized the entire notion of skill and craft that more or less shaped the canon. 

This rock slinging way of riling the sociopolitical order we look back to in regard. Art history had been unfolding in a relatively predictable manner; they were called avant garde, the vanguard, the fore-guard but looking at the almanac of social upheavals they were not ahead, they were within. They were recording in real time the world around them, often through absurdity, maybe an ambivalence.

They went to ground, to clubs and theaters, to respond to the calamity of the world around them. This was through words, actions, sometimes artworks. Something was wrong, these were strange, dangerous times.

We find ourselves again at endless war, where the only constant is the negation and posturing of truths and falsehoods.  When the world goes rigid, reductive and high-pitched, artistic practice must not respond in kind, but rather go low, limp, cryptic. 

It becomes undone and more itself than it was before. 

Nina Beier (b. 1975, Denmark) lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark.A graduate of Royal College of Art in London, Nina Beier’s two decade long practice has moved between sculpture and performance, often occupying both at once. Beier’s chosen material tend to be visual tropes that are forever mutating and slipping in and out of meaning or visibility, in a continuous state of transformation. In her practice, objects oscillate between their material presence and their image, defying a singular perspective. Ambiguous and elusive, Beier’s work engages with the boundlessness of things, their multiplicity of meanings and, ultimately, their fundamental unknowability.