What happens when an artwork is not simply something to look at, but something to experience with your whole body?

The internationally acclaimed artist collective Numen / For Use takes over ARKEN’s Store Gallery with Tape Ishøj – a monumental, site-specific installation made from kilometres of tape. Stretched between the gallery walls, the tape forms a delicate, seemingly fragile network of lines, surfaces and organic shapes. A dreamlike structure unfolds throughout the space, inviting visitors to step inside the artwork and explore it from within.

Numen / For Use works at the intersection of contemporary art, architecture, scenography and design. Since the late 1990s, the collective has explored how simple materials and precise constructions can create new ways of experiencing and inhabiting space. In Tape Ishøj, the material’s inherent properties – tension, elasticity, weight and cohesion – become central to the form of the work. Through repetition and accumulation, each new strip of tape connects with the next, gradually transforming the gallery.

But Tape Ishøj is not simply a space to enter. It is a space activated by the body. As visitors move through the installation, new perspectives and connections emerge between body, material and architecture. The work invites visitors to sense space in new ways and discover how movement, balance and presence can transform their perception of it.

The light, flexible structure contrasts with ARKEN’s striking concrete architecture. Here, precision meets sensory experience, and stability meets transformation. The work invites children, young people and adults to explore a world in which art, architecture and the body merge – and where a familiar space becomes something entirely different, if only for a moment.

The exhibition is supported by
Kemp & Lauritzen Fonden
Augustinus Fonden