The Wardrobe, 2024
Performance and installation
The Wardrobe combines performance, mime, theater, and concert. The performance focused on togetherness, ranging from family to society. The family gathering is a personal experience that most people have an intimate relationship with - but at the same time the idea of the harmonious nuclear family is used politically as an ideal image of society. This creates a structural normality that excludes those who do not fit into the norm. In this way, our ideas about the community of the family are connected to the way we create communities in society. But what about the family that doesn‘t fit together? What about that and those who do not fit into society‘s normality? Following this, The Wardrobe works with the idea of community on multiple scales: from personal, everyday experiences to experiences of cohesion on a wider, societal level.
During the performance, a group resembling a family is depicted. They are trying to get together, participating in the act of beekeeping as a shared tradition. But they are haunted and driven by nostalgia for what they once were. Their suits become a skin that provides a uniformity, blurring their identities, but also encapsulating them in an unbreakable distance from each other and encasing each member in an impenetrable cocoon of isolation from the outside world.
Gradually, things are turned upside down. In this, the family becomes fantasy. The wardrobe, traditionally a vessel for our outer layers - the clothes we wear to face the world - becomes a threshold that challenges viewers to reconsider their relationship with everyday objects and the natural world.
In the end, the beekeeping family serves as an allegory for our times. Their struggle reflects our own grappling with identity, belonging, and the ever-changing nature of human relationships. We carry with us the challenge to look beyond conventional definitions of family and community, and to imagine new ways of being together in a world that often seems designed to keep us apart. What is togetherness? With whom and for whom? What is kinship? And could the fragmented family serve as another model of being together?
Documentation of performance at Kunsthal Aarhus, April, 2024. Filmed by Jacob Juhl and August Juhl
The Wardrobe was performed by Mark Tholander together with Kasper Jensen (mime choreography), Laura Marie Madsen (vocals and songwriting), Søren Høi (rhythmic composition and drums) and Sarah Owens (trumpet). By working with a mime artist, The Wardrobe focuses on the make-believe of the social contract. By working with several musicians, The Wardrobe highlights the common condition as an ensemble, sometimes in-sync, sometimes out of sync.
During the performance, the aesthetic of absence takes center stage. Nature is conspicuously missing, yet its presence is felt through the ritualized actions of beekeeping. A ritual of control performed in empty space. This absence of the natural world mirrors the absence of familial objects – the tangible markers of shared history and belonging. Through this void, the performance disrupts what truly binds us together.
We‘re reminded that the structures we often take for granted – family, community, nation – are, in essence, collective beliefs. They exist because we agree they exist, a shared fiction that shapes our reality. These beliefs can distance ourselves from each other and the world at large. But what happens when we begin to question these assumptions? The performance suggests that in this questioning lies the potential for radical reimagining of our social bonds.
Performance photo, Kunsthal Aarhus, 2024. Photo: Mikkel Kaldal.
Performance photo, Kunsthal Aarhus, 2024. Photo: Jacob Friis-Holm Nielsen.
Performance photo, Kunsthal Aarhus, 2024. Photo: Jacob Friis-Holm Nielsen.
Performance photo, Kunsthal Aarhus, 2024. Photo: Jacob Friis-Holm Nielsen.
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