The exhibition ”Significant Notes” by Scottish artist Christine Borland, presented by Århus Kunstforening af 1847 (The Aarhus Art Society of 1847) in the Aarhus Art Building, has perspectives of great immediate and ethical interest. The exhibition is about the relation between science and the biology of the human body. In a series of subtle and beautiful works Christine Borland focuses on cosmic relations of a kind none of us are able to grasp with our immediate sensory apparatus.

In 1997 Christine Borland (born 1965) was nominated for the prestigious British Turner Prize and she has already had several solo exhibitions in both the USA and Europe.

HALL A

The works Ecbolic Garden and The History of Plants According to Women, Children and Students.

Christine Borland’s works are full of good stories that are relevant to us all, no matter our interest in art. For this exhibition she found an old story about a Scottish doctor, Mark Jameson, from around the year 1550. Dr. Jameson had an idea of planting a most specialized botanical garden at the university in Glasgow. Among other things, he wanted to plant a number of plant species known to induce abortions, even though they often involved a great risk for the women in question. Thus the name of the work: Ecbolic Garden, “ecbolian” meaning abortion provoking. We do not know if Dr. Jameson ever planted his garden and what he intended to do with it. Were his intentions with the project of a good or evil kind? We will never know, but Christine Borland’s work calls our attention to the complicated process of obtaining knowledge – and the fact that this process often is possible only because of other people’s sacrifices.

Throughout history a great number of bodies have been sacrificed on dissecting tables in order to serve scientific purposes. In a very precise sense Christine Borland captures the paradox that death gives us a better knowledge of the means by which we can preserve life for the living. These are topics that man has been dealing with ever since the Renaissance where scholars began opening the human body in anatomical theatres. We seem to be witnessing a renewed interest in this subject, as evidenced in TV-shows about the work of forensic experts, like “X-Files,” for example, and various documentaries about the work of the FBI. Borland has spent a lot of time at research institutions, just as she has also worked with police experts in their hunt for the elusive tracks of identity.

The History of Plants According to Women, Children and Students is a comment on all the anonymous hands involved in the making of the first extensive Renaissance botany by Leonhart Fuchs, published in 1542 in Tübingen. All plates were engraved by artists and copperplate engravers – all mentioned by name for posterity – but the names of all the women, children and students who hand painted each and every copy of the book were never mentioned. In order to pay a tribute to all the forgotten working hands of history Christine Borland has turned the process around in a modern work of art consisting of reprints of selected plates from the original book.  This time, all the women who have painted the new plates are mentioned by their names.

HALL C

A Treasury of Human Inheritance

The mobiles are made of agate slices of different colours mounted in silver frames. The colours used relate specifically to real families’ histories in terms of hereditary diseases and represent a visualization of genetic branches from these families’ genealogical trees. Thus the works become a treasury of human inheritance drawing our attention to the beauty hidden in the DNA of the human organism. Borland has visualized this treasury by means of showing disease progressions in the shape of for instance Myotonia congenital, a genetic muscle disease causing the families in which it occurs to die out within four generations. Nowadays we are witnesses to the dilemma of gene tests. On one hand we’re curious to know more about our hereditary background, but on the other hand the information obtained can provide us with a kind of knowledge we’re not interested in having or even cannot make use of in any way. The focus in these works is man’s eternal interest in his own biological roots – the history of the human species at large as well as the history of separate families – and the social consequences that are the result of this kind of knowledge.

HALLC/THE ROTUNDA

Skull, Upper extremities, right, Breastbone, Collarbones, Shoulder blades, Ribs, Spine, Sacrum, Pelvis, Lower extremities, right, Lower extremities, left

The work consists of 11 cut diamonds bathed in a spotlight. Diamonds are made of hard pressed carbon. Also the human skeleton is made of carbon, although in a less compressed form. Some years ago Christine Borland bought a human skeleton by mail order from an osteological supplier. After a closer inspection of the bones it turned out that the skeleton came from a 25-year-old woman from Asia who had had at least one advanced pregnancy. This was the only knowledge Borland was able to obtain as to the identity of this person, this human life, whose earthly remains were now contained in a box for her to look at. Borland was shocked by the fact that it was possible to obtain a real human skeleton by mail order – at a moderate price, even. She had thought that she was buying a copy of a skeleton. Later Borland bought diamonds of a weight corresponding with the weight of the human skeleton so that what we now see is a reminder of the invaluable piece of jewelry that the human body, its identity and history, really is.