Tine Bek: Histories and Forms
March 31st, 2023
By Polina Chizhova
In her house outside Copenhagen, Tine Bek’s cat and dog enjoy a friendly wrestle whilst the Danish artist tells me about her recent work, Year Without a Summer, exhibited at Arden Asbæk Gallery in Copenhagen, and her publication, The Vulgarity of Being There Dimensional, awarded The Hasselblad Photo Book Grant.
A photographer at heart, Tine Bek describes her practice as recently multi-disciplinary. Her approach is to use media as tools, rather than letting them dictate an identity. Bek’s work is imbued with visual references and historical connections. While studying History at the University of Copenhagen, Tine assisted a photographer, who recommended that she explore her creativity. This advice led her to study photography at Fatamorgana, before completing an MA in Fine Art Photography and Moving Image at the Glasgow School of Art. Inbetween, Bek spent time interning at Ryan McGinley studios in New York and navigating boundaries between photography and art.
“Technical aspects have never been my focus”, Bek explains. She finds delight in mistakes and unexpected outcomes, preferring to shoot with a medium format camera (Mamiya RB67) or a point-and-shoot film camera - “I don’t usually use a light meter, it would take the magic away.” Influenced by key figures such as Wolfgang Tillmans, her preferred source of inspiration remains literature, especially as it allows you to shape your own images, fostering imagination and germinating new projects.
Town Horses
When asked about her background in history, Bek describes herself as a non-traditional historian who combines research with encounters, shared knowledge and spontaneous experiences. She explains that whilst the role of historic elements fluctuates in her practice, being intuitive and thinking visually are the main aspects of her work.
Bek’s most recent project, Year Without a Summer, is a testimony to her approach as she intertwines the history of the horse with storytelling. The narrative starts with the 1815 eruption of the volcano Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia – a meteorological event that created large-scale weather consequences around the globe. The volcanic dust lowered temperatures and caused snowfall in summer, resulting in an agricultural crisis and famine the following year. Grain prices rose and keeping horses became a luxury, meaning that thousands of animals were slaughtered, which subsequently led to the creation of the ‘Dandy Horse’ by Karl Drais, a precursor of what we today call a bicycle. ‘This was the year Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, as she spent more time inside’, Bek tells me. The global impact of something seemingly so far away is a parallel that fascinates the artist, with its similarities to the Covid pandemic. ‘Sometimes history repeats itself. Not that we have learned from what has happened in the past.’
Riding Horse
Exhibited at Arden Asbæk’s Gallery, Year Without a Summer is not Bek’s first project on horses. In 2020 she worked on Horses Horses, photographing at the Royal Stables in Copenhagen. What fascinated Bek in the process, is that a wall away from the stables, in the same building, an exhibition shows stuffed horses – a lifeless representation of their living counterparts in such proximity. When living in Copenhagen, Bek also witnessed the daily horse parades that she describes as a “living memory”, watching people performing actions from a different time. It is these contradictions, contrasts, and marginalia that animate Bek’s work, taking the viewer on a journey beyond established knowledge.
Bek admits that researching horses was a subject she feared would be too “simple”. Yet the symbol of the horse bears a strong societal meaning, full of symbolism and accompanying mythologies. Their role as a noble human companion on the one hand, which contrasts with their animalistic nature, creating a unique hybridity. The more Bek researched, the more interrelations between horses and humans appeared. The discipline of dressage for example comes from war practices, where the horse had to be an extension of the human body. But then again, horses were replaced by new technology and were slowly relegated to become a “museum object”.
Twins
Off With The Head
Year Without a Summer offers the viewer a contemplation of the horse’s multiple symbolisms. Bek’s carefully composed photographs and short videos juxtapose horses and their depictions in different situations: roaming ‘freely’ in a paddock, being trained to swim, exercising dressage, but also being represented as statues, often placed in central urban locations as commemorations of generals and royalty.
Bek tells me about the Danish sculptor Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen, one of the first women sculptors officially recognised in the country, and her statue of a young man on a wingless Pegasus in homage to her husband, composer Carl Nielsen. The sculpture was completed in 1939 and is prominently located next to the Østerport station in Copenhagen. “Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen started sculpting by using butter to create animal figurines”, Bek explains enthusiastically, as this has been a crucial inspiration for her future work. Year Without a Summer already contains a reference to the sculptor’s practice with Bek’s butter figurines of horses.
The exploration of materiality and entity has been a central research point in her previous series, The Vulgarity of Being Three Dimensional. The eponymous monograph was published by Disko Bay in 2022 and mostly focuses on still lives, depicting opulent flowing and bulging shapes in a baroque and rich visual world. Bek’s inspiration was sparked by reading Karen Blixen’s short story Carnival, which made her question the perceived crudeness of the “vulgar” and led her to explore the hierarchy of material forms. The series conveys an organic tactility and tells a sensorial story of textures, emphasising the three-dimensionality of objects and their “objecthoods”.
Amorosa In the Morning
Butter Horse
It is this balance of everyday and extraordinary that Bek’s practice uses to explore class, hierarchical structures, narratives and history-making. Disrupting what we once thought we knew, Bek’s use of photography repositions, reconsiders and reimagines the perception of what surrounds us.
Tine Bek, 2022, by Paula Duvå
About Tine Bek
Tine Bek (b. 1988) is a Danish multidisciplinary artist whose practice addresses a fascination with the spaces and everyday objects we choose to surround ourselves with. With humor and sensibility, Bek works across still life photography, installations, sculptures, books and video works. Often presented as aesthetic experiments, her work functions as contemporary time capsules rooted in art history and nature morte.
She holds an MA in Fine Art Photography and Moving Image from The Glasgow School of Art. Prior to this, she studied photography at Fatamorgana, The Danish School of Art Photography, and assisted American photographer Ryan McGinley and Danish visual artist Adam Jeppesen. In 2016 she co-founded the gallery 16 Nicholson Street in Glasgow, curated exhibitions and started a mentorship programme for recent graduates. From 2015 to 2018, she published four volumes on emerging artists through her independent publishing agency The Photographic Earth Sagas.
Bek’s work is included in the permanent collection of The Danish National Photography collection. She has exhibited nationally and internationally including Christiansborg Palace (DK), Arden Asbæk Gallery (DK), Fotogalleriet (NO), 700b Gallery (US), Studio 488 Gallery (AR), Project Space Gallery (UK) and National Library of Lithuania (LI). Her book ‘The Vulgarity of Being Three-Dimensional’ investigated uncontrolled forms that in the sculptural tradition have been dismissed as vulgar or possibly baroque. Her work has been published in Another Magazine, Verk Tidsskrift, Vogue IT, Vogue Scandinavia, Weekendavisen, Eurowoman, The Wire Magazine and Source Photographic Review.
She is based in Copenhagen, and represented by Arden Asbæk Gallery in Denmark, Vasto Gallery in Madrid and the Picture Room in New York.