”This project began with a fascination for an ancient way of seeing the body as inseparable from the world it moves through. In Homer’s time, thinking, feeling, and sensing flowed through the body and were thought to be an inseparable part of lived experience. I found this especially alive and present in A.A. Long’s reading of Homer, where people are shown as a psychosomatic whole — a living network of thymos (spirit and emotion), phrenes (mind and heart), and noos (intellect) — always in conversation with their surroundings. In the Odyssey, when Odysseus meets his mother in the underworld, she tells him that the sinews no longer hold flesh and bones together once life has left the body, and that the psychḗ “flies away like a dream.” This view of the soul as the final breath, departing but no longer embodied, runs through the funerary objects in the exhibition. I see these artifacts as almost fossil-like impressions — not in a geological sense, but as enduring imprints of ancient worldviews, reimagined as contemporary sculptures in dialogue with present-day worldviews and their resonance with the ancient. The exhibition brings together fragments from burial contexts: a sphinx wing transformed into a hybrid three-part form, a wall piece of what is believed to be the soul (psychḗ) — in Homeric terms, the final breath — from painted lekythos vases, a Kore hand holding a bud, and a mirrored hand with a flower in bloom. Many of the fragments have been reimagined through 3D scanning and reprinting, their transformation suggesting a passage from innocence to experience, while quietlysuggesting how language and inherited ways of dividing body and soul still shape the way we inhabit the world today. The sphinx, in antiquity both a guardian of the dead and a keeper of riddles, stands here as a figure of thresholds, mystery, and transformation. The mirror element, present both in the reflective floor and in the lekythos imagery of mirrors, doubles works and viewers, evoking reflection across time, between life and death, and between ancient and contemporary understandings of the body as porous and relational. A special thanks to: Mateas Pares, The Danish Institute in Athens, Rasmus Sevelsted, Marie Moberg, and Tim Høibjerg.” — Christine Dahl Helweg-Larsen
Selected Solo
Exhibitions
Selected Group Exhibitions
Selected Grants
and Awards