Eternal Feminine

Press Release

- A long time ago when the world was whole, a dragon lay down to die

- A dragon? I wanted a true story.

- A dinosaur, then. The very last of her kind. A dinosaur lay down on the ground to die, but before she breathed her final breath, she took her tail between her teeth and bit down hard, her body forming itself into a circle.

- I read somewhere that dinosaurs had a second brain in the tip of their tails, to help them thrash and wriggle. When she died, your dinosaur’s brains were both in her skull. One in her brainpan, the other resting on her tongue.

-Maybe. The point is her brain—her brains—went out like a light, and the dinosaurs were no more. Soon, the mammals came to strip the flesh from her bones. They would mate, and grow old, and finally die, and their children would do the same. One of them found her fossil.

- Where did she live? This dragon. This dinosaur?

- This Caudipteryx. A place we now call China. Have I told you about the apple orchards in Szechuan? There are no bees there anymore – too many pesticides – so the farmer’s sons have to bring the trees to fruit. They climb up into the branches with these tiny brushes, and paint pollen onto the blossoms.

- Like a covenant? I think that’s floods. Anyway, a huge meteor had hit the earth. The sky was full of ashes.

- Goethe said that if a rainbow lasts longer than fifteen minutes, we get bored and just ignore it. The apple farmers must miss the bees. Maybe they’re teaching their sons to make honey.

Excerpt from a short story by Tom Morton featured in the catalogue. Tom Morton is a writer, curator and Contributing Editor of frieze.

This is the first exhibition in the USA by Danish artist Alexander Tovborg. Tovborg (1983) lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. His work has been exhibited internationally at State of Concept, Athens; Irish Museum of Contemporary Art, Dublin; Hospitalhof, Stuttgart; Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen; Carnegie Art Award, Stockholm and most recently at the Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen.