At Vallensbæk Station you will find the exhibition space PULS, a partnership between Vallensbæk Municipality and ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art. PULS continuously presents video works as well as videos from and about the activities of Vallensbæk Municipality. The works are shown 24 hours a day and are aimed at passers-by, offering them an artistic pause in everyday life.

In March, you can experience a work by Sonja Lillebæk Christensen.

In Sonja Lillebæk Christensen’s video work Vild med Drengen (2007), a cavalcade of YouTube clips featuring Jumpstyle dancers slides across the screen. With low image resolution and a hard bass soundtrack, the viewer becomes part of an enamoured spectator’s binge-watching of the energetic videos, documenting an early era of user-generated internet forums. Next to the work, a translated rendering of a verse from Dinah Washington’s soft 1961 recording of the song Mad About the Boy is displayed. The same verse appears again at the end of the work.

The song, which also gives Lillebæk’s work its title, describes the experience of unhappy, unattainable love on the big screen. The combination of the binge-watch effect and Mad About the Boy highlights the duality of accessibility and inaccessibility embedded in the medium. The videos are available to the viewer around the clock, without limitations. As the work shifts from one melody to another, the focus moves from what we concretely see to an awareness that looking can also mean watching someone furtively. A double-sided, lurking dynamic thus emerges between the female viewer and the male bodies jumping across the screen.

The work explores the potential for a new type of one-sided relationship, in which viewers and followers on social media become attached to the people they watch, something that internet platforms such as YouTube enabled in new formats.

Sonja Lillebæk Christensen (b. 1972) is a Danish artist who primarily works with video installation. She is a co-founder of the exhibition space Sydhavn Station.

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