SOPHIE  HJERL

Celebra Cerebra, 2023

The Chapel in St. Hans Have, Site-specific

Augmented Reality sculptures and installation

- Celebra Cerebra (Latin for ‘celebrate the brain!’) was the title of the exhibition that filled the Chapel in St. Hans Have in May and August 2023 - albeit with a different kind of fullness than usual. The work was an Augmented Reality (AR) piece consisting of individual virtual objects accompanied by composed sound and music that the viewer could follow on their own smartphone or tablet. The aim was for the various virtual objects to allow the viewer to move around and explore the house, combining different stories, objects and experiences into one unified work. When experiencing the site for the first time, many are struck by the history of the area and especially the chapel, which stands as a strange yet powerful monument to a bygone era. A chapel consisting of a ceremony room, a cold room for storing corpses and a section room where patients' brains were removed for research. The chapel dates from 1883 and for about 100 years it fulfilled that function. Ongoing brain sectioning is no longer performed as no important data can be collected from dead brains other than physical deformation. Fortunately, the days of taking the same amount of an organ that is so elementary and central are over.

Of the approximately 300 visitors to the exhibition of Augmented Reality works, many were in meetings and conversations. One priest visited the exhibition and she was shocked. She had seen many chapels, but never where section rooms and cold rooms surround the ceremony room. It is also seen as eerily brutal and violent to bury people without their brains. So where are they in death? - is the next question you ask yourself. One day an elderly woman came in, she had been a nurse at the hospital and knew “Søren-død”, who drove around the area and picked up the bodies in a hearse. He was also a carver and often sat eating his lunch and talking to the bodies. Many were patients he knew and he put newspaper where the brain had been removed. If it was a patient with a good sense of humor, they got the pages with the cartoons. The former nurse had seen the bodies. They were lying on some boards with some fabric over them, she said. When she saw the image created virtually for the room, she exclaimed: “It's spot on”. The image was an attempt to create an image of “someone who had died in the Viking Age”, where the bodies were buried and burned, unless you were a dignitary with your own grave, to include the previous history of the area. But that's what they looked like, the bodies lying in the room.

Ephiphany, 2023

Sculpture and AR work for the exhibition Far West, Museum of Religious Art, Lemvig

Oyster shells, plaster, wood, pu, polystyrene, sack, cloth, sound

190 x 50 cm

In the AR sculpture Ephiphany, a physical object is seen standing still like a fjord or sea creature, looking out over space, like a ghostly primordial being. Using Augmented Reality, the viewer experiences a virtual sculpture of a female figure that can be moved around the room by the viewer, changing in size as it rotates. When the artist's grandmother, who was from Lemvig, passed away, she came to say goodbye. The artist's maternal family were Tatars, and it is said that they lived on the heath. They were not allowed to be buried in the cemetery, but only outside it, as they were considered unclean - invasive. The physical sculpture is made from oyster shells - the invasive species of Pacific oyster that is now also found in the Limfjord. What is the original and where do we come from? When the artist's mother gave birth to her and her sister, the first thing she asked for was oysters. The sculpture's addition of the digital present can be a gateway to show what was and still is, but which we do not always seem to be able to register. The digital as a tool for other dimensions?