PEOPLE

Thordis Adalsteinsdottir
Frances Goodman
Johannes Sivertsen
Daniel Svarre
Modou Dieng Yacine

April 24 – June 6, 2026.

List of works

Tekst på dansk

In SPECTA’s new exhibition People, works by five artists are brought together, each exploring the construction of the human subject - individually, socially, and culturally. The title points to the dual meaning of the concept of “People”: on the one hand as an open category referring to people in a general sense, and on the other as a marker of a specific collective identity, defined through belonging, cultural codes, or borders. The exhibition explores the tension between what is universal and what is specific, between the individual and the group, and between self-understanding and the gaze of the other.

In Johannes Sivertsen’s paintings, we meet everyday people from the artist’s neighborhood in Paris. These intimate, seemingly uneventful portraits register the social as a form of discreet coexistence: the individual figures are grounded in concrete biographies, yet at the same time function as representations of a micro-collective - a neighborhood’s “people,” constituted through proximity, daily routines, and shared presence rather than formal structures.

In the work of Modou Dieng Yacine, the focus is on the urban public space of Dakar. The works are based on photographs taken by Yacine in Dakar and subsequently reworked with acrylic and oil stick. Through rhythm and gestural layering, the pulse of the city is emphasized in the fleeting portraits of people on the go, moving from one place to another. In this way, the motif shifts from documentation to an aesthetic construction that both anchors the individuals in their specific socio-cultural environment and inscribes them within a broader space for reflection on culture, modernity, and identity as something in flux.

In Group 5, a sculpture by Daniel Svarre, five sets of clothing arranged in a closed circle form a kind of embodied analysis of collective formations, where the figures manifest a clear sense of community. The circle functions as a visual and spatial image of the dual mechanism by which group dynamics simultaneously produce both inclusion and exclusion. The sculpture becomes an investigation into how “People” can operate as a strongly delimiting social form.

Frances Goodman’s sound piece I Know What You Are Thinking stages the stereotypical notions attached to the idea of “the others.” The voices articulate prejudices about whites, blacks, Jews, the young, the old, and more, bringing the normative and the taboo to the surface in a single movement. The work reveals how categorizations of groups - “people” in the sociological sense - are reproduced and internalized, often beyond our conscious control.

In Thordis Adalsteinsdóttir’s works, the human being is displaced from the center. Animals appear as allegorical figures articulating psychological and existential states, while the smaller human figures function as commentaries on a contemporary culture marked by restlessness, self-optimization, and distraction. This inversion of roles points to a critical perspective on the modern subject, which appears both peripheral and overwhelmed in its encounter with a world that is no longer easily decipherable.

People addresses how ideas of community, identity, and difference are continuously produced and reproduced - visually, socially, and politically. The exhibition not only provides examples of who people are within the constellations they inhabit but also sparks a conversation about how they become part of a “people”: through the gazes, images, and structures that shape our understanding of ourselves and of one another.