Ynja Blær uses drawing to explore how our consciousness perceives life. The drawings are made in layers over a long period of time, either on paper, concrete, or stone. Her process can be described as a “long exposure” on a film, where different lighting conditions blend together to capture the true nature of a place, or even the feeling of the consciousness that inhabits it.

Daníel and Helgi Már revisit their 2014 collaboration, Grotto Berlin, updating it to reflect current times. Their work explores how memories and emotions accumulate in a space, both in an art historical and everyday context. The title of the work is a nod to the Merzbau works of Kurt Schwitters, a pioneer in 20th-century avant-garde art. Schwitters redefined contemporary art by using found materials, often discarded, and with them rethought the boundaries of form and space. His works – especially Merzbau – function like modern caves: chaotic, organic environments built from the remains of everyday life. Historically, man-made caves were seen as sacred places, a sort of boundary between the ordinary world and something beyond, where nature and human creation, and the sacred and everyday, met. Schwitters’ Merzbau updates this tradition, giving the ancient idea of the cave a new meaning that reflects today’s conflicts, displacement, and fragmented societies.

Schwitters’ use of found objects within the system of visual art is not rooted in permanence but in transformation. This approach relates to how history itself accumulates layers, destruction, and strange mixtures. Instead of creating monuments to the past, Schwitters made spaces that felt temporary and unplanned. His art resists the clean lines of rationalism, offering a tangible but unstable poetic idea where new shapes and meanings emerge from ruins. 

At Kling & Bang, a second iteration of Daníel and Helgi Már’s work is created, and the layers of emotions, forms, time, and spirit continue to be central. Ynja Blær’s layered drawings exist within the overall space their work creates. All the artists in the exhibition work with accumulation – adding more emotions, more weight, another coat of paint, another layer of pencil, constantly building and adding – more and more.