White Energy and Women

Peter Linde Busk’s ceramic work at Galleri Kant. Photo: Lone. 2015.

Virginia Woolf seems to be everywhere in my life at the moment. I read the literature she writes and I go to a lecture series named after her essay A Room of One’s Own. But I did not expect to meet her at an exhibition.

White Energy at Galleri Kant is curated by Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen; the title refers to Woolf’s reflections on creative energy in A Room of One’s Own – the utopian fever state of pure creation. Works have been selected because of their ‘whiteness’ and ‘strong formal power of enunciation’. So the reference to Virginia Woolf is not to her feminist agenda – which is the key message I took away from reading her – but applying more broadly her insights about the need for freedom to create. Thus, only three of the nine exhibiting artists (or groups) are women, which I supect would have somewhat disappointed Woolf. Perhaps it is reflctive of a sad reality that so many years later, men are still more likely to have access to this state.