Dante's Inferno

I finally went to Aros (aka Dante's Inferno) a couple weekends ago. (yeah a little while ago but so much has happened in the last couple of weeks).

(Background info: The design of the Aros museum in Aarhus, Denmark was loosely based off of Dante's Inferno with the 9 spaces in the basement representing the 9 circles of hell and the panoramic walkway on the roof of the building representing the ascent to heaven.)

As you approach the museum, the first thing you notice is the multicolored walkway which appears to be a halo above the other downtown buildings. As you enter the museum you walk up a long and daunting ramp. Once inside, to the left is a small cafe and gift shop and to the right are the ticket booths and the entrance into the exhibits. But in the middle of it all is a woman. A thin white robe drapes down her shoulders to the floor, covering her body. Only the bottom of her jeans and her white tennis shoes poke through. A white cloth of the same material covers her head and a wreath of silver and pink roses keeps it in place. Her face and hands are powder white. In her right hand, she holds out a small bouquet of the flowers to the visitors, inviting them to take one. And in her left hand is a single silver rose held up at a 90 degree angle form her face. Her eyes and mouth are closed and relaxed as if she is taking in the roses' aroma. At her feet is a woven basket full of coins. It takes a moment to realize that this isn't a real woman but a statue, yet she seems so life-like.

Aros

As you get your ticket to see the exhibit, you realize that half of the visitors are not Danish and you manage to catch a small part of a conversation in English which you are not accustomed to not hearing outside your lab and apartment. It's comforting to understand what the people around you are saying even if it is only for a few hours.

Entrance to Aros

When you had entered the museum from the long ramp, you had actually entered on the middle floor. As you look over the railing to the floor below, you see the curved back and arched spine of a giant boy. His giant hands clasped together over his dark brown hair as if he was praying.

"Boy"

You descend the spiral staircase getting closer to the depths (rooms) of hell. You look up to the squatting boy towering over you and try to image how tall he would actually be if he was standing. You look into his eyes. He isn't praying but looking off into the distance behind you, his mouth pressing against his right arm. He looks angry, sad, frightened and mischievous all at the same time depending on what angle you are looking from. Every detail of the "Boy" is incredible. From his toenails to the little creases between his toes, to the blood vessels barely visible under his skin. The "Boy" is the work of Ron Muecks, an Australian hyper-realist artist. This sculpture is the centerpiece of the Aros museum for which the director competed against other museums to obtain this beautiful work of art.

"Boy"

The spiral staircase

As you continue down the spiral staircase, you have now entered the De 9 Rum ( The 9 Spaces) of hell - the catacomb of the museum. All 9 spaces are shrouded in black, and as you look to both sides, you can't see anything. Is there someone next to you or are you all alone? As you walk through, you view the brilliant displays of light and video artwork from around the world that seem to last forever. As you emerge from the darkness, you begin your ascent to heaven.

You wind your way back up the spiral staircase, past the boy and the ticket booths to the museum's three permanent collections.

The first is the works by the Swedish artist Annika von Hausswolff and it's entitled ANNIKA VON HAUSSWOLFF- IT ALL ENDS WITH A NEW BEGINNING. The exhibit consists of photographs of people and everyday objects yet they provoke an uneasiness in the viewer. There is something very unsettling about the small girl holding a chainsaw and the man and women laying on a basketball court covered by a white sheet. There are a set of ordinary blinds  that have been dented, ripped and some of the panes are missing. Images of couches with disturbed cushions and bathtubs whose shadows hold their owners secrets. The photographs leave you with a sense that something horrible has just happened or is just about to happen. Then there is the incongruous of a series of repeated pictures that seem exactly the same and you just can't grasp the deeper meaning behind them. But the one that has stayed with me the longest is the photograph that takes up an entire wall of the exhibit from floor to ceiling depicting a search party where a group of people are walking through a forest at dusk or maybe early morning searching for a small child. I wish that right next to it was another photograph depicting the search party finding the child alive and well.  

As you walk to the next exhibit across the building you look outside and admire the view of downtown below and the beautiful buildings with their red clay tiled roofs.    

Downtown Aarhus

You enter the next exhibit through a glass sliding door and are hit with a magnitude of color in sharp contrast to the last exhibit with its dull palate of white, beige and blue. You have arrived at the Contemporary  Art exhibit of Danish and International artists. You are introduced to the works of Ian Monroe and get lost in his paintings of architecturally structured space trying to figure out where one shape ends and the other begins. And when you turn around in the middle of the room there is a big plastic light pink sphere with circular cut-outs. After you have walked around the sphere and start to feel a little dizzy, you look up to see a smaller silver metallic sphere on a small wooden balance beam. As you look beyond the sphere there are two portraits of human dolls (at least 20 of them in each picture wearing identical military outfits). In one of the pictures, the girls are behind glass as if they are on display. In the other one, they are laying sprawled on one of those moving walk ways they have at airports resting against the glass cases they had previously been entrapped which now holds an aquarium. Then all of a sudden, you hear a noise and as you look back down at the metallic ball, it starts to roll back and forth very slowly as if a small breeze has just passed by. And then it starts to move, gradually making it's way to the other end of the beam.

You leave the exhibit to the sound of a compilation of movie clips and make your way further up the spiral staircase, this time to the Director's Choice exhibit. As you walk in your confronted with rocks covering one side of the floor and a couple of well manicured fake trees. The first half of the exhibit is similar to the contemporary exhibit you have just came from, but placed here and there are works that don't match the bright colored theme. A metal skull with silver trees growing out of its' frontal bone and an incredibly detailed house has been built on its' parietal bone. You make your way through the exhibit and you soon find your self in a dim lit room with paintings of pictures of human-like figures with disproportionate body parts. You walk over to a plane wooden shelf holding jars filled with dissected animal parts (?) in brine. Then there is the movie of the cellist bowing to a clapping audience that is on a loop. The closer you get to the end of the exhibit the more disturbing it gets. Closer to the end, you see this incredible drawing by Julie Nord of a girl in a dress tittled "Homecoming Queen". But her face is an dripping dark ink blob seven times the size of her miniature waist with only the eyes and mouth of a human face. She has no nose or ears. Puff sleeves and white long gloves adorn her arms. Her full skirt takes up a third of the page, intricately decorated with a  collage of horses whose faces are skulls, spiders with human heads and snake tongues and laughing strawberries with dark angry eyes . At the bottom of the page, barely noticeable are her feet with little white heals sticking out from under the skirts ruffled hem. You walk out back into the bright light of the afternoon sun not knowing how you feel about what you just saw, but you recognize how uncomfortable it made you feel, and make your way up the final part of the spiral staircase to the last of the three permanent collections of the Aros museum, The Golden Age.

The Golden Age is the works of Danish artists from 1770-1900. Here everything is basked in a soft golden light. It's calming as you walk through the landscapes of 18th and 19th century Denmark. As you progress through the exhibit, there are pictures of the sea with boats bobbing on the waves, the beaches that line Denmark's coasts and portraits of noble men and woman. There are pictures of the Royal Palace in Copenhagen from all different vantage points. You can see the influence the Italian and French teachers had on the Danish artists. I like the paintings were one artists paints another artist painting. You learn that photographers used the paintings as inspiration as to what to photograph. And then some artists went even further and painted panoramic views of there location. The most beautiful pictures are the ones of Istanbul and Spain. They are full of color and the people are always laughing and relaxing. They are a sharp contrast to the pictures done of danish life. The Golden Age was my favorite exhibit, it gave me a glimpse into Denmark's history and you can see how much it has changed. As you leave through the sliding glass doors, you pass by a painting of the First National Constitutional Assembly in Copenhagen in 1848.

You have almost made it to the top, the multicolored view that intrigued you to visit in the first place. There is only one way to get up to the panoramic walkway since the other one is closed down due to construction, so you wait in line until it is your turn to take the elevator to the roof. The elevator doors open and you step out, slowly walking around blue,to purple to pink and around red, to orange, to yellow taking in the view of this incredible city that you now feel a part of, green to blue. From the yellow and orange ocean front, making the roofs of the buildings shimmer as if they were built from gold. To the pink and blue expanse of the city stretching out below you. You walk down the stairs to the roof looking at Aarhus without the colored glasses as the cool breeze flows past. As I was taking in the beauty of the city, it hit me that I have less than one month left in Aarhus. I thought about all the amazing people I have met and places I have visited. There is still so much left to do! I feel so connected to this city even though I have lived here for such a short time.

  But your time is up and now you must return to the ground.