Ann Lislegaard uses compelling narratives infused with noir-esque mysteries to dilate our senses of sight and hearing. With her sound, light and video works she creates changing and unstable mise-en-scènes that explore the relationship between place, identity and subjectivity. In these temporal re-arrangements and spatial dislocations she asks her audience to consider the ways space and time are perceived.

“By questioning the development of spatial and temporal knowledge Lislegaard's work reflects the spatial and temporal development of knowledge itself, revealing that all cognitive experiences have social origins where there are no simple answers nor any innocent questions.” Matthew Buckingham

Bellona (after Samuel R Delany) is Lislegaard’s second solo exhibition at Murray Guy, a work shown this summer in the Danish Pavilion of this year’s 51st Venice Biennale. Bellona, the fictional city of Delany’s 1974 science fiction cult classic Dhalgren, is a place beyond reason, where time and space is out of joint and architectural fixtures seem to be in constant flux and transformation. In Lislegaard’s video animation, Bellona is a psychological space in which norms and standards seem to dissolve into a chaos of anti-hierarchical conditions.

You may ask me what place the image of the city of Bellona holds in the minds of those who have never been here. How can I presume to suggest? There are times when these streets seem to underpin all the capitals of the world. At others, I confess, the whole place seems a pointless and ugly mistake, better obliterated than abandoned. The miracle of order has run out and I am left in an unmiraculous place where anything may happen. There is a deceiving warmth that asks nothing. What use does any of us have for two moons? Objects are lost in double-light, What makes it terrible is that in this timeless city, in this spaceless preserve any slippage can occur. Sometimes it seems as if these walls on pivots are controlled by subterranean machines, so that, after one passes, they might suddenly swing to face another direction. Parting at this corner, joining at that one, like a great maze – forever adjustable, therefore unlearnable.

Ann Lislegaard was born in Norway and now lives in Copenhagen and New York. She has exhibited widely in Europe. In the United States her work has been seen recently at the Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT and in Son et Lumiére at the List Visual Art Center, MIT, Cambridge, MA. As well as in the Venice Biennale, she is currently participating in the Gøterburg International Biennial, Sweden and in the exhibition Ecstasy – In and Around Altered States at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.