24 August – 22 September 2024

Please join us for the opening on 23 August 7-9pm

"I am my own fever."

Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa

Pachinko is very pleased to present Marbles, an exhibition by Sofie Amalie Andersen and Thyra Dragseth. Domestic, dream-like, unnerving, Dragseth and Andersen’s work considers the unstable mirroring effect of relationship conflicts.

Marbles is a transgeneric love story about conflict and relationship dynamics, refraction and fragmentation. The exhibition consists of a series of sculptural interventions and a film, presented in four chapters with an asynchronous soundtrack. Set within a domestic, yet alienating space, the film gradually turns into a hall of broken mirrors as the two protagonists (assumed lovers) unwillingly play out a dialectical game of recognition and estrangement. They may want the same, feel the same, but contradiction has become the only possible movement as the identity of each is a reduction to a mirrored singularity, a totality, therefore, a stopping of movement.

The title of the show, Marbles, refers to both the combative and psychological aspects of relationship conflicts: playing with and potentially losing one’s marbles, serving heartbreaking oneliners towards that other person for all the marbles worth. In the exhibition, such marbles are hanging as a curtain that at the same time reveals and disguises what is at stake, while the fragmented desires and fears of the protagonists continually play each other off the board. Meanwhile, the changing perspectives – the mirror effect – removes any chances of reconciliation and leaves the scene unsettled and fractured.

Sofie Amalie Andersen (1989) is a Danish visual artist. She is educated from the Malmö Art Academy (MFA 2021) and Oslo Art Academy (BFA 2018) and in 2022 she participated in the Maumaus International Study program in Lisbon. Andersen works with a broad range of materials and mediums – from sculpture and installation to text, printed matter and film. Her composite and contrasting works reflect her own dubious questions regarding reality. Often merging traditional artistic techniques with industrial DIY aesthetics, she seeks to provoke an increased awareness of those interlaced material, emotional and linguistic structures that surround us. In her work she stresses moments of fragility, tension and ambiguity, which, in her view, are key concepts of life itself. Sofie Amalie Andersen is also director of the exhibition space SOL in Nexø (DK), from where she has been curating and organising exhibitions for a number of international artists since 2019.

Thyra Dragseth (1993) is a Norwegian visual artist. She lives and works between Lisbon and Oslo from where she is currently attending the MFA program at the National Academy of the Arts. Dragseth works multidisciplinary with photography, film, text, and installation. Her works often arise from her own lived experiences and perception, becoming pieces of translated reality. In this sense, Dragseth's work relates to the ethical landscape of artistic methodology — how to handle other people's perspectives and shared memories. She often collaborates with both colleagues and non-artists, implementing collaboration itself as a method for further reflection in her practice.

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Marbles is a continuation of an exhibition of the same title shown at Ostra, Lisbon, in July 2024. It is supported by Kulturdirektoratet, Statens Kunstfond, Nordic Culture Point and Statens Værksteder for Kunst (Copenhagen)

The artists would like to thank:

Celine Engebrigtsen,, James Newitt, Pedro Rocha, Rita Duarte, Paul Tracey, Maíra Botelho and Marco Antão.