Summer and beaches belong together! This summer the Architecture Museum will be presenting artist Jenny Berntsson’s documentation of her ravels to various beaches where she has built “sandcities”.
Sandcity
The purpose of the project is to find out how our immediate environment impacts on what is built and on the people frequenting the place. Added to this, Jenny Berntsson investigates the functions of art in different settings – in the eastern and western worlds, in megacities and in the wilderness. How does the work of art – the sandcity in this particular instance – affect the surroundings in which it is built and how do the surroundings in turn impact on the sandcity? Jenny Berntsson has among other things visited two places which are one another’s opposites in several respects: densely populated India and sparsely populated Iceland. Hers is a site-specific art, i.e. art created for the place where it stands.
In each place Jenny Berntsson has modelled and cast building shapes of importance to the city concerned. She has chosen to work with sand because sand sculptures have an inherent degradation process and will only endure for a certain length of time. The interference is temporary, with no more than a momentary impact on the site.
Turkey
Jenny Berntsson built her sandcity on Kilyos, the popular beach on the shore of the Black Sea, 20 minutes north of Istanbul. The Mihrimah Sultan Complex mosque was chosen to represent the city because it can symbolise Islam and the thousands of mosques in the city.
India
Mumbai is a city of about 14 million inhabitants. Here, the place gets dirty, hot and crowded, and most of the refuse/sewage ends up in the sea whence it is washed up, for example, on Chowpatty Beach in the centre of the city. 60% of the population do not have the use of a toilet, 73% live in rooms accommodating, on average, 4.7 people.