Yngve Holen

Yngve Holen, born 1982 in Braunschweig, Germany, lives and works between Oslo and Berlin. His sculpture dissects the technologies reshaping contemporary life. While his work is characterised by his use of machines, systems and industrial spare parts used for, around, and by the human condition—in transportation, communications, waste, medicine, manufacturing or industrial food production—the body itself is almost always evoked only in its absence. Material remnants of frenzied aspirational living: the desire to live longer, to travel further and faster, or to enhance intelligence, are all folded into Holen's works. The resulting objects short-circuit and contradict themselves to highlight the fraught subjectivities and troubled moral landscapes of today. Spanning classical to state-of-the-art industrial processes, Holen's works complicate the conceptual functioning of the technologies at stake, reframing them as ornamental, or – despite their futuristic constitutions – delivered with a flat, unnerving humour, as future relics of a bygone era.