EXHIBITION
NATALIE PRICE HAFSLUND: CLEAN CRIMINAL

Opening: Friday 13 April, 7pm
Exhibition: 14 April – 20 May 2018
Venues: UKS & Kunstnernes Hus
Artist Talk: Saturday 19 May, 12pm
Interview: Read UKS’ interview with Natalie Price Hafslund here

Natalie Price Hafslund’s solo exhibition «CLEAN CRIMINAL» sets forth a series of displays that occupy both the recently renovated UKS grounds and a part of the neighboring venue Kunstnernes Hus.

In her practice, Hafslund pushes at the borders of normativity and psychosis, disturbing inherited ideas of sociological conditioning and disputing perpetual abuses of power. This is often done via mixing violent gestures or abject personalia with cultural quotation, an example being Hafslund’s merging of her own hair-waxing strips with thick layers of deep-hued oil colors in a series of CoBrA-inspired paintings.

An intended measure of destruction, breaking down materials to their ground zero to let loose involuntary, compulsive, or irrational gestures is the main means here. This is a clean calculation of becoming criminal. The result is, on the one hand, a series of beaten canvases turned brutally beautiful paintings shown at Kunstnernes Hus.

On the other, the rebellion includes strong comments on the clean capitalist rationalization of the criminal (female) body and its self-ownership. At UKS, Hafslund’s exhibition weaves performative sculptures and new video works playing with the span between behaving badly, feeling bad, and being clinically categorized as such, through mental illness or incarceration. This in-between includes images of toads fucking pies, an unstoppable automated vacuum cleaner donning a glittery salmon coatee, a criminal record stating the artist’s suitability as a nanny, and a black-and-white film clip of a papier-mâché Woody Allen being shot down by cards thrown by Hafslund herself.

BIOGRAPHY:
Natalie Price Hafslund (b. 1987, Devon, UK) lives and works on the River Thames in London. She is a graduate from the Royal College of Art, London, and has studied at The Mountain School of Arts, Los Angeles. Previous exhibitions and projects include Yellowed Minds, C-o-m-p-s-i-t-e, Brussels (2016); Death by Coffee, Chalton Gallery, London (2016); Tarantellegra, Hester, New York (2016); and I have No Mouth and I must Scream, Cell Projects, London (2017).

PRESS:

– Review in Kunstkritikk (online journal)
Til sengs med fienden, Kunstkritikk, 27.04.2018