And it is in honour of their crimes that I am writing my book.
With these words, Jean Genet sets the tone for his novel Our Lady of the Flowers (Notre-Dame des fleurs), in which Paris is portrayed through characters on the fringes of society. We encounter drags, pimps, and perhaps most of all, betrayal and death. Genet’s characters contain many identities at once – within one person, we meet all people, both their beautiful and their dark sides.
The traitor is a figure that evokes both fear and fascination – someone who steps outside the community and thereby becomes visible. In Traitors, Jóhan Martin Christiansen explores this duality: the beautiful and the shameful, the body and its transformations, morality and its aesthetics.
During his residency at Trykkeriet, Christiansen has created a series of twelve new copper etchings in both small and large formats. The works take their starting point in Michelangelo’s sculptures of thieves and other classical art-historical motifs, which are digitally reworked. Here, the figures are stretched and manipulated until they appear androgynous, crushed, or distorted – bodies in dissolution, neither male nor female, sinful nor innocent.
Across the picture surfaces, restless lines have been scratched, gathering and dissolving the motif at once. In some areas they condense into clusters; in others they tremble at the edges, as if the image itself quivers with doubt. Fragmented words and phrases weave into the works – echoes of themes of sexuality, exclusion, and betrayal.
History is full of traitors: from Judas Iscariot to Cassius and Brutus, from Victorian moralism to the broken hearts of pop music. In Genet’s writing, the traitor becomes a mirror figure for humanity itself – complex, double, unavoidable. In a similar way, Christiansen’s Traitors seeks to capture this ambiguous tension between body and language, guilt and desire, myth and the human.
Jóhan Martin Christiansen (b. 1987) is a Faroese artist living in Copenhagen. His works span various media such as installation, plaster reliefs, printmaking and video and often explore questions related to materiality: How do we handle a specific material, and how are materials handled within a specific context – physically, emotionally, and philosophically? His artworks often contain small meaningful details in terms of materials, titles and form that invoke themes such as landscape, home/homelessness, language and translation, queer body, baroque, pop music and historical events. Christiansen graduated from Malmö Art Academy and has since completed the interdisciplinary course Of Public Interest at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. In 2023, he founded the artist-run project space Bonne Espérance. His most recent exhibitions include Kongegaarden (Korsør, 2024), Kohta (Helsinki, 2024), The North Atlantic House (Copenhagen, 2020- 2021), Møstings Hus (Copenhagen, 2020), and the National Gallery of the Faroe Islands (2016).
The residence and exhibition are supported by the Faroese Ministry of Culture & the Nordic Culture Point