‘A cameo appearance if you ever saw one’, Kasper Bosmans (Belgium, 1990, lives in Brussels) says about his diptych Tails (2022), one of the ‘legend’ paintings in this exhibition. This particular painting builds on the 1969 work Dwarf Parade Table – with a blue-capped plaster garden gnome and blown-out eggs suspended under a wooden table – by American artist Paul Thek, whose oeuvre and persona have inspired many contemporary artists identifying as queer.
While relevant to Bosmans’s thinking and to his exhibition at Kohta, his first ever in a Nordic country, this particular piece of background information is nevertheless not of first-order importance for understanding them. So let us first delve into two notions that are.
A cameo is a small carved gem, often encountered in Greek and Roman art. The metaphorical use of the word to signify ‘a small, distinct and detailed piece of art within a larger work’ has, in turn, led to the expression ‘cameo appearance’: a brief and often uncredited performance by a well-known character. Think of Alfred Hitchcock suddenly appearing in his own films.
In Latin, legenda is ‘something to be read’, originally about the life of a saint. Nowadays it is any story that is unverifiable but still conveys something that is true, if only about human life in general. A legend is not just something literary but also something literal: a text next to an image or a symbol, tasked with explaining and explicating it. It attempts to mediate between two related but distinct realms of articulation, the visual and the verbal.
The exhibition is embedded, quite literally, in its most immediately noticeable layer: ten free-standing wall elements, the different nuances of green, red, yellow and blue on these elements and the regular walls and, most significantly, a mural in the form of a frieze, titled Folds (Sea, Outside, Plow, Bunk) (2026). It folds around the upper parts of the regular walls and continues the sheet and blanket motifs that we recognise from the tucked-in legendary characters, while gently transforming into a landscape and a seascape. This sets the stage for all the appearances that have already been detailed. The work Grub Slumber (2024), a series of wall-mounted plexiglass objects in the shape of grubs (larvae of the woodboring beetle), has been added as a final touch of transience, sowing doubt and creating a sense that the exhibition is eating itself from within.
While relevant to Bosmans’s thinking and to his exhibition at Kohta, his first ever in a Nordic country, this particular piece of background information is nevertheless not of first-order importance for understanding them. So let us first delve into two notions that are.
A cameo is a small carved gem, often encountered in Greek and Roman art. The metaphorical use of the word to signify ‘a small, distinct and detailed piece of art within a larger work’ has, in turn, led to the expression ‘cameo appearance’: a brief and often uncredited performance by a well-known character. Think of Alfred Hitchcock suddenly appearing in his own films.
In Latin, legenda is ‘something to be read’, originally about the life of a saint. Nowadays it is any story that is unverifiable but still conveys something that is true, if only about human life in general. A legend is not just something literary but also something literal: a text next to an image or a symbol, tasked with explaining and explicating it. It attempts to mediate between two related but distinct realms of articulation, the visual and the verbal.
The exhibition is embedded, quite literally, in its most immediately noticeable layer: ten free-standing wall elements, the different nuances of green, red, yellow and blue on these elements and the regular walls and, most significantly, a mural in the form of a frieze, titled Folds (Sea, Outside, Plow, Bunk) (2026). It folds around the upper parts of the regular walls and continues the sheet and blanket motifs that we recognise from the tucked-in legendary characters, while gently transforming into a landscape and a seascape. This sets the stage for all the appearances that have already been detailed. The work Grub Slumber (2024), a series of wall-mounted plexiglass objects in the shape of grubs (larvae of the woodboring beetle), has been added as a final touch of transience, sowing doubt and creating a sense that the exhibition is eating itself from within.
