Heaven is overrated 2023

Nikolaj Kunsthal - Platform 27th of Oct - 3rd of Dec 2023

Material: Vinyl (588 cm + 1000 cm), Paper and sound.

Sound score: TERMINAL Composition by Lydia Ö. Diakité & H.Hartvig

In the exhibition "Heaven Is Overrated" Lydia Östberg Diakité  transforms Platform into a multisensory space with  a starting point in the sky as a social-existential ecosystem in which sensations, theories and moods both break and create deep political narratives.

In the exhibition, Diakité works with heaven as a liminal space and reflects on the promise of heaven as a paradise. Christian promises of the kingdom of heaven are destabilized through speculative narratives, with references to Christian iconography. The artist reflects on heaven as a claustrophobic and ultimately psychotic place. A place where intertwinings  of anxiety and conflicting feelings about the actual 'truth' of this place haunt one in life as well as in the  afterlife.

It is this concept that defines the framework for Diakité’s exhibition. But "Heaven Is Overrated" is not a showcase for religious dogma. On the contrary, the  aim of the exhibition is to step out of binary representational paradigms about faith. Paradigms that only  visualize people when seen through logics that deal  with rationality, obedience and duty, or something  original and magical. However, the exhibition does  not only speak to this sensation – to its violence and imaginary worlds – as the primary thing but rather to  the stories, performances and poetic relationships  that touch even liberating intimacies, death and reinvention of the first to practice a marxist ideology, they created a system to give to the less fortunate from the commonwealth of the collective

Photo: Mads Holm