Upcoming:
1. The Taste to Participate
3. Gade Monster
8. To Lie on The Grass - A Manifesto
10. Doso Radio Station
How We Acquired the Taste to Participate
Kunsthal Charlottenborg (2025)
How We Acquired the Taste to Participate—an installation of three videos made from found material and photographs sourced online around the 2012 London Olympics. The work examines the ideological content tied to the Olympics—especially its portrayal of children—and its effects on the urban landscape. The hand-crafted, fragile quality of the installation stands out: pixelated images, cardboard structures, coloured-pencil titles, and face-frames doubling as viewing points. This aesthetic evoked childhood, a central theme, while also embodying the concept of effort—present in footage of children striving in Olympic sports and in the handmade set pieces, Lyons extends this critique by linking Olympic ideology of participation to participation in art. Props in the room seemed to stage an invitation to take part—yet as an unfulfilled promise. By referencing terms like natural talent, endurance, and genius, Lyons drew parallels between sports and art. The reimagined podiums—here functioning as stages or viewfinders—shift from symbols of victory to contested sites of visibility. The work asks: who gets to stand there, to speak, and in what voice?
The work is also a nostalgic lens into a time when hope felt more possible, more performable. This “joyful sadness” balanced honesty and satire, operating somewhere between the two. Though built from documentary materials, the found footage and photographs are filtered through a fictional or satirical lens that acknowledges its own construction. Even autobiographical elements are subject to this play. For Lyons, the work also touches on the complexities of heritage. As an international artist in Denmark, how can one make art about their origins when the remnants of their childhood neighbourhood are merely ruins of a past random global event? The project interrogates capitalism’s comfortable and uncomfortable relationship with heritage—linked to inheritance and patriarchal structures—while acknowledging its potential as an obstacle to progress. Ultimately, How We Acquired the Taste to Participate is as much about critique as it is about affection. It reflects on how we become subjects, lingering in a space where resistance, nostalgia, and participation intermingle.