ARTIST

PETER BRANDT

The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen
The Royal University College of Fine Arts, Stockholm.

Peter Brandt’s artistic practice stems from 1970s feminist body art, especially from the American art scene with Hannah Wilke as the most important reference. It was in his encounter with early feminist art that Brandt learned that any experience could be transformed into an artistic manifest.

In his work Peter Brandt is concerned with assaults in different contexts such as violence, dehumanization, trauma, self-destruction, testimony and seeing oneself die. Here Brandt explores the complicated relationship between the individual and collective trauma, as well as the communicative collapse between the traumatized and the outside world. He draws on a variety of different theoretical thinking, such as feminist theory, masculinity studies, trauma theory and art historical material. Currently his work is exploring masculinity in a historical, social and cultural perspective, which a specific interest in the negotiation between gender and traumatic experience.

Shaking the habitual: What is your utopia?

The author and activist bell hooks (US 1952) were asked a few years ago about how she wanted her books placed after her death: “In a museum, when male supremacy is dead. I would like my work to be an anthropological artefact from an extinct, primitive society “(bell hooks).

Inspired by the bell hooks quote, Peter Brandt has developed The Order of EMPATHY. The works deals with reparative strategies to heal the wounds from abuse of power, violence and patriarchy and consists of 209 hand sewn silk/cotton pads, a stone and a wood block, made of wood from South Africa.