Birgitte Vad
Formation Gallery
10 Apr 2026 – 16 May 2026
Mirage is a dreamlike total installation in which the audience is invited into a displaced, sensuous universe that mirrors the artist’s inner landscape in constant negotiation with an external, commercial visual language. The exhibition unfolds in a field of tension between desire and resistance, beauty and exhaustion, seduction and vulnerability.
Within the space, paintings of dissolved faces, reflections, and textile landscapes appear, spreading across the floor like remnants. A soundscape runs through the installation: the artist’s own voice rehearsing not to buy a pair of sunglasses interweaves with cacophonous calls from the Kantamanto Market in Ghana.
Kantamanto is one of the world’s largest markets for second-hand clothing, and a place where vast quantities of Western overconsumption end up. Here, textiles accumulate into dystopian soft landscapes of discarded garments, far removed from the systems and desires that produced them. A tangible image of global imbalance, where some consume while others both sustain a livelihood and live with the consequences.
Mirage operates in the tension between desire and resistance, between attraction and fatigue. References to fashion magazines and advertising aesthetics flow through the works, yet encounter a raw and unpredictable materiality: used textiles, remnants, traces of something that has already lived. Perfect surfaces and promises of transformation stand side by side with the worn, the discarded, and the excessive.
The exhibition points to the uncomfortable paradox we are all part of: a Western consumer culture that produces both desire and waste in the same movement. Yet rather than shaming or holding the viewer accountable, the works operate in a more open and sensuous register. There is something playful and disarming in the installation, and a constructive aesthetic dimension.
For the artist, with a background in the fashion world, materials become not only testimony to a system but also a site to work from. Not as pure critique, but as a displacement: an attempt to take what already exists, the used, the overproduced, the already burdened, and give it another kind of meaning. A slower, more sensuous value that cannot be measured or optimized.
Mirage is not a moral judgment. It is a space one enters. A place where beauty still operates, but is no longer innocent. Where materials carry their histories with them. And where, amid excess, fatigue, and remnants, small shifts emerge, through which something else might take shape.
Birgitte Vad (b. 1980) is a visual artist whose practice revolves around materiality, desire, and consumer culture. With a background in fashion, she now works with painting, textile, and installation, exploring how images and materials shape our understanding of the body, identity, and value. Her works move between the seductive and the unsettling, where aesthetic codes from fashion and advertising are displaced and brought into dialogue with used materials and traces of previous lives. Within this tension, a visual space emerges in which attraction, doubt, and resistance coexist. Vad is the founder of the exhibition space Building B at the Sugar Factory Møn (2022) and has exhibited nationally and internationally. She gained broad attention with her portrait paintings of H.M. Queen Margrethe II for the cover of Eurowoman (2020), one of which was subsequently acquired by the Royal Household.
