Tau Lewis

From September, you can experience Mouth Close to Earth at Kunstmuseum Brandts; a major solo exhibition by the Canadian artist Tau Lewis. The exhibition, which is the artist's largest to date, is created in collaboration with the art gallery Tramway in Glasgow and the Performa Biennial in New York, and it is part of the museum's increased focus on international collaborations.

With meters of old fabric strips, leather, shells, and other found objects, Tau Lewis processes the great existential narratives in which we mirror ourselves and our surroundings. With recycled materials, she weaves together current topics such as sustainability, climate crisis, species survival, and belonging with spirituality, cultural roots, and a challenge to past hierarchies in both art and world history.

Our Common Roots For Tau Lewis, each of the recycled materials contains energies and stories that, through working with them, become connected to the present. When she insists on performing the painstaking handcraft with the works herself, it has roots in her Jamaican and social heritage. At the same time, the time-consuming and repetitive work becomes a counter-movement to the high pace of the performance society and the pursuit of growth. A quiet protest, but also a gentle push in a new direction, where the repetitive and the collective layers from previous owners and generations of work are allowed to fill. Here, sustainability in its broadest sense also encompasses time, care, immersion, and togetherness.

The large tapestries, wall-mounted masks, and human-height sculptures contain stories of displaced peoples and people living without a homeland, but also other stories that have often been omitted from art history. Where architecture, sculpture, and oil painting were previously considered “proper art,” several contemporary artists consciously use softer and more feminine materials and work processes to remind us of something we have overlooked. Tau Lewis expands the perspective to also include forgotten myths and ritual practices that remind us of a universal human spirituality, which holds the possibility of feeling that we are all rooted in the same world across time, geography, religion, and culture.

At Kunstmuseum Brandts, one enters an immersive total installation of spirits and gods, textile narratives, where several of the works are created specifically for the exhibition in Odense, and are linked together by a soundscape created in collaboration with composer and musician Lyra Pramuk. All the works in the exhibition are linked to the myth of the Sumerian goddess Inanna, one of the oldest recorded stories we know, from around 2300 BC.

About the Artist Tau Lewis was born in 1993 in Toronto, Canada, and today lives and works in New York and London. Lewis has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including at The Barbican in London (2024) and at the Venice Biennale (2022). She also has several solo exhibitions to her name – including at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (2024) and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami. The exhibition at Kunstmuseum Brandts is her largest solo presentation to date.

The exhibition is created in collaboration with Tramway, Glasgow and Performa Biennial 2025, New York.