Amitai Romm
Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2023
1985
Denmark
Veda
At Liste Art Fair 2023, Veda presents a solo booth by Amitai Romm (1985, IS).
The presentation includes a large installation titled Keeper, which covers part of the booth’s entrance. The work holds a single Citron fruit suspended within a transparent divider, in an enclosure without space or air.
On one level, Keeper is a diagram of what it might mean to make an image, by isolating a slice of the world in a piece of fiction. At the same time, the work explores dynamics related to desire and consumption, as it is refracted by the ritual use of the Citron fruit in the Jewish holiday of Sukkot.
In the days leading up to Sukkot, regular Citron fruit see their market value increase, as part of the ritual is the search for the finest, and most aesthetically perfect specimen.
"The lemon in question was an etrog, one of four types used during the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. For the rest of the year it is just another fruit, but in the days leading up to Sukkot, its value increases exponentially as the hunt commences for the finest, most aesthetically perfect specimen. In the art world, value is created on similar terms: framed by the ritual context of the exhibition, with great volatility from one moment to the next, and exclusively on the basis of something like belief—both in the magic touch of the artist, and in the art system as the sanctioned purveyor of auratic objects.
The Analyst pretends to be an agent of rationality, but is blindly absorbed by the absurd allure of the lemon—that’s what makes him a golem. So, according to the golem logic of art, since the lemon is valuable, it should be exhibited and preserved. And there it is, squeezed against the windowpane, vacuum packed between two sheets of plastic, shriveling, flattening into an image. It is a reductive idea of what art is, of what an exhibition is, that displays the seams of its own construction. As Romm wrote in the same text, “Of course it slips, the surface becomes a field, the ground does its dizzying thing.”
–excerpt from Animate Inanimate: Amitai Romm by Kistian Vistrup Madsen, on Mousse Magazine #72, July 2020.
In addition the presentation includes new work in Romm’s Influencer Sarcophagus series. These works consist of food grade styrofoam boxes which contain sealed micro-environments, made of various fragments from the artist's practice, as well as edible spices, synthetically isolated scents and earplugs. Activated by terrarium heating lamps or computer hardware fans, the works disperse molecules to influence their surroundings in more or less subtle ways.
Amitai Romm is a dowser for the postapocalyptic generation, using magnetic rods and 3D printers to divine how we might survive in a hybrid ecology. The Danish artist’s drawings, sculptures and installations are understated fantasy, evoking a landscape within which salvaging scrap metal, analysing algae DNA and drawing are all equally necessary activities. Romm reasserts the work of the artist as a form of science-fiction proper: a meeting of two realms of experiment – science and fiction.
(...)
Scattered on the floor throughout the building were a series of low polystyrene boxes, titled Sarcophagi, offering an alternative form of library: the pleasing scent of the star anise, cardamom or cinnamon that sat in some of the boxes being distributed by small ventilation fans, or in others mace spray or plastic earplugs imbued with synthetic grapefruit oil. The drawings here seemed to illustrate Romm’s vision of a possible future more directly, peopled with humanoid figures sprouting countless tubes and complex organic machines producing who knows what gloop.
_excerpts from Amitai Romm, selected by Chris Fite-Wassilak, on Future Greats, Art review, February 2018.
Lastly, the booth will present new graphic work from research related to both Keeper and Influencer Sarcophagus, as well as works from the series Analyst.
Analyst: A semi-fictional character, in search of a perfect skin.
Immersed in a civilizing ritual to keep the world in check, seeking to eliminate inconsistencies and construct a ground from which to begin and end.
Of course it slips, the surface becomes a field, the ground does its dizzying thing.
Amitai Romm
b. 1985, Jerusalem
lives and works in Copenhagen, DK
Amitai Romm (b.1985, Jerusalem, based in Copenhagen, Denmark) studied at the Jutland Art Academy, Akademie der Bildenden Künste Vienna and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Recent solo exhibitions include: Graft, Veda, Florence (2023); Hum, Spike Island, Bristol (2022); Macula Lutea, Veda, Florence (2019); Hibernation, Tranen, Gentofte (2017); and How shall the sea be referred to, Bianca D’Alessandro, Copenhagen (2016). His work has been included in group exhibitions at Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2019); Vermillion Sands, Copenhagen (both 2019); the Dorothea Von Stetten Award, Kunstmuseum Bonn ( ...
Amitai Romm works with the relationship between technological systems and biological environments and with how their increased entanglement can inform alternative perceptions of the world and our place in it. Romm explores how nature is mediated by technology, speculating on the hybrid relationships that can form between plant life, sensors, data collection processes and our own human bodies. He has done this through an extended sculptural practice that often results in a number of collaborations with other disciplines than the artistic. Another characteristic of Romm's practice is an abili ...