With luminous slogans mounted on scaffolding, the Scottish artist Nathan Coley creates verbal interventions in landscapes and urban spaces. At first glance, the installations resemble the signs used to advertise American church halls, casinos or funfairs, but with the ambiguous statement ‘THE SAME FOR EVERYONE’ the artist challenges passers-by and invites reflection on what equality means.
Performative signs in Central Jutland
Nathan Coley’s art project has been a long time in the making; in the process, the artist visited the Central Denmark Region to scout locations for his light installations. The words, ‘THE SAME FOR EVERYONE’, refers to one of the most treasured Danish values, equality for all, and Nathan Coley had the idea for the text, title and theme of the artwork during one of his trips, when he visited the eco village Friland (Freeland) and saw an old sign reading ‘Ens for alle’ (The same for everyone).
The artist now displays this value-laden statement in ten signs distributed throughout the region. Nathan Coley underscores the performative character of the signs, which causes the meaning of an installation to change with its physical context. ‘The sentence, the words in themselves are not the focus of the work, and the sites will of course always be there. It is in the space where the words and their surroundings meet that magic happens,’ he comments.
Juliana Engberg, programme director of Aarhus 2017, agrees with the artist and points to the ambiguity of the artwork in contrast to the upbeat commercials and funfair signs that have lent their visual expression to the installation.
‘Nathan’s funfair lights are temporary statements introduced into a landscape or an urban area to create a new image. The use of the twinkling crystal lights lends his signs a seductive, sublime and enigmatic character in combination with an aspect of something sombre and ephemeral. The funfair theme sparks associations to theatre, the circus and festivities, creating a tension between the slightly lurid and garish aesthetic and the poetic, profound and powerful statement,’ she says.
Living dialogue from coast to coast
As the biggest cultural event in Denmark for decades, Aarhus 2017 European Capital of Culture involves a year-long programme of activities and events in the city of Aarhus and in 18 other municipalities in the region. THE SAME FOR EVERYONE received funding from the New Carlsberg Foundation and is part of the art project Coast to Coast, which contributes to Aarhus 2017 with site-specific art in local settings and art institutions across the region. With their geographic spread across both urban and rural settings, Coleys installations form a special exhibition that creates a narrative sequence from the east coast to the west coast, says Rebecca Matthews, CEO of Aarhus 2017:
‘Nathan’s wonderful works and their spread across our region are symbolic of the power of our year to join our communities in spirited dialogue and shared celebration through that most catalytic of energies – creativity. Nathan’s proposition THE SAME FOR EVERYONE chimes beautifully with our ethos while it dares to question and seek to provoke a debate about our core values of Diversity, Democracy and Sustainability in the changing political arena, here in Denmark and elsewhere.’
