Femtensesse is pleased to present Business doing pleasure with you, a solo exhibition by Kaare Ruud.

Ruud’s practice focuses on sculpture and sculptural interventions, often using everyday materials in unconventional ways. Functional objects are transformed into works with unfamiliar qualities. By stretching, dismantling, or animating found objects, Ruud strips them of their original logic and function, revealing their poetic potential and questioning how human influence shapes our surroundings.

The exhibition unfolds as a landscape of oversized tables that shift the sense of scale. Respatex tables, design icons of their time and now symbols of contemporary nostalgia, are reimagined as spaces of memory and tension. The table holds a social and political role: a place where both the smallest and greatest conversations take place. Animated and strangely alive, they suggest a child’s perspective, reflecting the sense of powerlessness experienced from underneath.

Among this forest of tables hang drawers from Ruud’s childhood home, filled with personal belongings. Rediscovered untouched and flocked, their interiors become velvet-lined jewelry boxes embossed with the reliefs of their contents. In Georgi Gospodinov’s novel Time Shelter, characters build dementia villages for people with memory loss. Each room reflects a specific time, and sometimes a particular day. Eventually, even those without memory loss begin buying homes to indulge in nostalgia. The novel highlights themes that resonate in Ruud’s work—constructing sculptural landscapes deeply rooted in bodily memory.

High on the wall, a piece made of clock motors nods to monumental public clocks. Instead of telling time, its moving hands draw cryptic images that slowly shift. Ruud’s clockwork speaks of history and repetition, events that recur endlessly and the impossibility of freezing time.

This cyclical movement continues in sculptures made from men’s leather dress shoes, pressed together to form wheels, suggesting power spinning endlessly, trapped in its own motion—a metaphor for capitalism and the hamster wheel of modern life.

In Business doing pleasure with you, Kaare Ruud offers a subtle yet critical reflection on our social, economic, and ecological balances, while also examining craftsmanship, or what might still define its contours today.

This exhibition is kindly supported by Arts Council Norway, Oslo Municipality and Billedkunstnernes Vederlagsfond.