Henrik Lund Jørgensen

The Gottorf Castle Museum of Art and Cultural History continues its series of contemporary artist videos and shows a fascinating film by Danish artist Henrik Lund Jørgensen in the Friedrich III Hall. The focus is on storm and shipwreck, motifs that have been verifiable as a subject of visual art since antiquity.

The restless sea serves as a sphere of unpredictability, lawlessness, and disorientation, providing a counterpoint to the solid land. In fact, throughout the history of seafaring, it has often been the case that people on the shore could observe strandings and shipwrecks without being able or willing to intervene. The fact that coastal dwellers occasionally actively contributed to ships running aground, bursting off the coasts, and being plundered by moving beacons is one of the moral shadow stories of seafaring.

The dramatic motif of the shipwreck with spectators a view of the sea in which the idea of life as a sea voyage is expressed. This idea encompasses departure and homecoming, harbour and passage, storm and calm, distress at sea and sinking, rescue and mere observation. The sea appears as a theatre stage on which harrowing dramas are performed - but also the dream of another shore.

The Danish painter Michael Ancher (1849-1927) is considered an outstanding representative of the heroic maritime rescue motif in painting of the late 19th century. Ancher was one of the main protagonists of the Skagen artist colony. Around 1880, he achieved his artistic breakthrough with realistic, photojournalistic depictions of the dangerous everyday life of the Skagen fishermen, who frequently carried out rescue operations for shipwrecked people in the rough seas between the Skagerrak and the Kattegat. Characteristic of Ancher's heroic epic about the harsh life of the Skagen fishermen and their selfless commitment to rescuing people in distress at sea is that the actual dramatic event often occurs outside the picture. The viewer repeatedly encounters the motif of the gazing figure looking out over the sea.

In March 2008, the young Danish artist Henrik Lund Jørgensen (born 1975) travelled to Hanstholm, a town on the west coast of Jutland. He had previously been interested in this coastal landscape with its bunkers and traces of war and flight. He became aware that the coast represents a fateful place for fishermen and refugees alike. Fishermen risk life and limb for their catch, while wars, hunger, and lack of prospects drive thousands of people to flee across the seas. Lund Jørgensen decided to use the west coast as a stage and to link the site-specific art, fishing, and war history with his own experiences.

In the video Friends He Lost at Sea (2009), Lund Jørgensen works with the motifs and compositions of two of Michael Ancher’s most famous works: Vil han klare pynten? [Will He Make It Around the Headland?] (1879) and Mandskabet reddet [The Crew Rescued] (1894). As with a tableau vivant, the two paintings are re-enacted, but instead of the fishermen, refugees from other countries now appear. By having the heroic Skagen fishermen played by “boat people” and thus bringing Ancher’s pictures into the horizon of the present, questions of flight and rescue, emigration, and social responsibility are raised anew. Lund Jørgensen’s video installation, like Ancher’s heroic realism, stands on the border between documentation and fiction. For refugees, the saving shore remains ambivalent, as it can signify both the entrance to a promised land and the threshold to a no man’s land.