Looping the Hoop, Gl. Holtegaard, Holte, 2023
Dimensions: 200 x 80 x 60 cm 40 kg
Materials: mouth blown glass, stainless-steel, polystyrene balls
Video: 7 minutes on outdoor screen
100 plastic hula hoops scattered in the garden for use.
10 hula hoopers during the opening.
Photographer: Kasper Hjorth @burojantzen
Text and curation: Kit Leunbach
Looping the Hoop takes over Gl. Holtegaard’s baroque garden with a special focus on the concepts of time and cycle. With a gigantic, rotatable, pink hourglass
the artist takes up a frequently used symbol in the baroque. The hourglass represents the transience of life and reminds us that time is running out. The two halves of glass also point to the cyclical interaction of life and death; heaven and earth. But in Cuenca Rasmussen, the gloomy, baroque vanitas symbolism of the hourglass is turned into a life-affirming, cyclical matter. Not without a certain amount of humor, the work exudes a sober optimism that reminds us that an ending is always the beginning of something new.
The hourglass is placed in the middle of the garden’s central axis on a round elevation like a sculptural foreign body that has just landed. The circle also becomes a recurring element in the artist’s video work, which is shown on a large screen in the garden. Here, hula hoops are seen as spinning circles from a drone and scattered throughout the garden will be a sea of hula hoops that garden visitors can pick up and rotate around their hips.
