Song Dong – Collaborations – Kunsthal Aarhus 2017
Kunsthal Aarhus presents the first solo exhibition in Denmark by leading Chinese artist Song Dong. The exhibition puts focus on forms of cooperations, family relations and geopolitics.
The exhibition entitled Collaborations, transforms Kunsthal Aarhus both inside and outside and show the artist’s best-known works, as well as present new creations.
Song Dong’s works have a powerful way of expressing the effects of radical change and social transformation on members of his own family; he combines the past and the present, the personal and the universal, the poetic and the political.
The exhibition Collaborations is not a mono graphic show, and the title of the exhibition accentuates Song Dong’s strong interest in artistic collaboration. By also inviting the audience to be part of the collaborative processes, Song Dong opens the window to the creative process, and the exhibition can thus also be seen as a new collaboration between Song Dong and his Danish audience.
Exhibition period: 1 September–29 October 2017
Opening: 1 September, 5pm
The exhibition is supported by Nordea-fonden, Aarhus 2017, Statens Kunstfond & Oda og Hans Svenningsen Fond.
Eating the City is also supported by Tylstrup Kager & Frima Vafler.
The Centre of the World is made possible in collaboration with Anastasia Shanaah (Coordinator, Denmark); Christopher Hume (Australia); Daniel Horowitz (the United States); Elizabeth Kamile (Indonesia); Embassy of Bangladesh in Copenhagen, Denmark; Embassy of Israel in Copenhagen, Denmark; Embassy of Mexico in Denmark; Embassy of Portugal in Denmark and Vieira de Leiria Municipality (personaly, Mr. Armando Coimbra); Embassy of the Republic of Armenia to the Kingdom of Denmark; Embassy of the Republic of Croatia to the Kingdom of Denmark; Embassy of the Russian Federation in the Kingdom of Denmark; Johanne Roussy (Canada); Kazakh Honorary Consulate in Denmark and the Embassy of the Republic of Kazakhstan to the Kingdom of Sweden; Lindekilde family (France); Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Turkey; Peter Toft (Argentina); Rajiv Gambhir (Zanzibar, India, the UAE); Song Dong (China); Yun Choi (South Korea).
By Freebird Film
Song Dong interview at Kunsthal Aarhus 2014
Waste Not is a transformative installation of the full complement of worldly goods belonging to the artist's mother, Zhao Xiangyuan (1938--2009), including the wood frame of her house and over 10,000 everyday objects collected over a period of five decades. Carefully arranged in groupings throughout the gallery space, the objects form a miniature cityscape that viewers can navigate around and through. Song's mother was typical of the generation of Chinese who lived through the hardships of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s abiding by the dictum 'wu jin qi yong' (waste not): all resources should be squeezed for all their value and nothing be wasted. For the subsequent generation -- among them Song Dong and his sister Song Hui -- the result was a childhood surrounded by partially used bars of soap, buttons, books, assorted buckets, and scraps of fabric. Everything preserved as protection against future hardship, even in the face of improving economic conditions. Waste Not is a collaboration between the artist and his mother, initiated in an attempt to wrest her from grief following the death of his father in 2002. In the process of organizing and arranging the goods, the baggage of the past was unpacked and given a new life. Zhao's unexpected death in 2009 adds a special poignancy to the neon sign that reads, Dad, don't worry, mum and we are fine.
Presented here for the first time in Denmark, the installation was transported from Moscow to Kunsthal Aarhus in a shipping container with over 50 crates, and took a fortnight for Song Dong and his sister to arrange on the floor of the lower gallery. The project was first displayed at Beijing Tokyo Art Projects in 2005, and subsequently has travelled to several major venues including: MoMA, New York; the Barbican Centre, London; the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver; Carriageworks, Sydney; and most recently Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, in 2013.
DUMP! Multispecies Making and Unmaking at Kunsthal Aarhus
COLLECTIVE MAKING series at Kunsthal Aarhus presents a new exhibition curated by Elaine Gan, Steven Lam and Sarah Lookofsky.
Participants:
AURA; Amy Balkin, et al.; Lothar Baumgarten; Mabe Bethônico; Bob Braine, Mark Dion & Alexis Rockman; Patty Chang; Delft University of Technology; Peter Fend; Fernando García-Dory; Jacqueline Goss; Tue Greenfort; Henning Knudsen & Anna Tsing; Dana Sherwood; Åsa Sonjasdotter; SPURSE; Kidlat Tahimik; Cecilia Vicuña; Paweł Wojtasik; The Yes Men
DUMP! gathers together artists, scientists and organisms to explore multispecies collaboration that reshapes the ruins of modernity and resists industrialized progress. Contesting the celebratory logics of invention and making that dominate contemporary discourse, DUMP! creates an arena for waste, obsolescence, and decomposition, where practices of nurturing and collective cultivation may begin, turning composts to compositions.
DUMP! upends the division between nature and culture, while refusing separations between art and science; the art institution and the natural history museum; and wonder and comprehension. By presenting creations of humans and nonhumans alike, DUMP! calls out for new ways of seeing, describing, making, and living in unruly entanglement within contaminated worlds.
Inspired by Lucy Lippard, a self-described “compiler” of exhibitions, and taking its cue from garbage heaps – and the multispecies life that ferments and flourishes in them – the exhibition will continue to grow throughout its duration.
The exhibition is sited in and between two locations: Kunsthal Aarhus and Søby Brunkulslejerne - a post-mining landscape of contamination, garbage, and unruly multispecies transformation. Both places will host projects, proposals, artifacts, and concepts compiled along two strands of overlapping inquiry that constitute the DNA and organizing principles of the show:
UNMAKING MAKING:
There is a utopian and almost naive celebration of the creative maker in this era of crisis and extinction - a heroic figure invoked as alibi for economic recovery and sustainability by policymakers and governments. DUMP! proposes that the seduction of making, which also often goes unexamined in the field of art, dangerously reinforces a techno-positivist neoliberal logic of accumulation, which has accelerated the ruinous buildup that is threatening the very possibilities of collective life.
MULTISPECIES COLLABORATION:
The ecological crisis facing the planet evokes an apocalypse that can be rationalized and mapped. DUMP! proposes that its key challenge is messy: nature and culture, humans and nonhumans can no longer be taken apart. Plants, fungi, animals, microbes challenge us to reconsider the unruly, rogue, invasive, and unspectacular compilers that hold things together, in effect playing across difference. DUMP! challenges the story of human domestication and mastery with murky, multispecies heaps.
FIELDWORK AND PUBLIC PROGRAMMES:
Art-science collaborations established with the support of the interdisciplinary group Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA) will result in numerous newly commissioned projects and public events held on 5 - 6 September. Featuring participation and works by Åsa Sonjasdotter, SPURSE, Anna Tsing, Cecilia Vicuña, Paweł Wojtasik, among others, they will take place at DUMP’s two sites: Kunsthal Aarhus and Søby Brunkulslejerne.
COLLECTIVE MAKING series 2015 – 2016 is developed by Joasia Krysa, Artistic Director at Kunsthal Aarhus, and supported by the Danish Arts Foundation, Aarhus Kommune, the Obel Family Foundation and Goethe-Institut Dänemark. Additional support for DUMP! is provided by Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA).
The exhibiton is selected from an international Open Call in connection with our exhibitions programme COLLECTIVE MAKING.
The selection panel maked the following statements:
DUMP: Making and Unmaking of Anthropocene [previous title] is an excellent addition to the current Kunthal Aarhus Collective Making programme. We believe that when approaching ideas around collectivity in contemporary times, it is particularly urgent to consider the role of non-human agents and to collapse the hierarchies between nature and culture. We look forward to seeing how the participating artists and contributors propose a new aesthetic language for post-anthropocentrism and multi species collaboration. The project also presents an exciting curatorial and research collaboration between Aarhus University and Purchase College State University of New York (SUNY) that will inform the related public programme.'
Exhibition period: 27 June - 20 September 2015
Cafeen på Kunsthal Aarhus
Kunsthal Aarhus har andet på tapetet end kunstudstillinger og har skruet op for blusset under stedets café både ude og inde.
Song Dong: Eating the City – Kunsthal Aarhus 2017
For 2017, Kunsthal Aarhus presents the major solo exhibition, Collaborations, by renowned Chinese artist, Song Dong, which begins with making an edible replica of the City of Aarhus and a public performance where citizens of Aarhus will be able to – literally – eat a large scale model of the city made from biscuits.
Exhibition period: 1 September–29 October 2017
Opening: 25 August
The exhibition is supported by Nordea-fonden, Aarhus 2017, Statens Kunstfond & Oda og Hans Svenningsen Fond.
Eating the City is also supported by Tylstrup Kager & Frima Vafler.
nervous systems - languages of wonder & denial at Kunsthal Aarhus
Exhibition curated by Fatima Hellberg & Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz.
Artists: Kathy Acker, Sif Ankergård, Cornelius Cardew, Alex Cecchetti, Patrick Coyle, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Cinthia Marcelle + Tiago Mata Machado, Atalia ten Brink, Wu Tsang.
nervous systems - languages of wonder & denial brings together historical and contemporary works which experiment with, and enact scenarios for what a restless and evolving language might look and sound like. The exhibition includes new and existing works by artists, performers, musicians and writers seeking to destabilise the rigidities of grammar, whilst subverting ideological and moral conventions. Through an ongoing engagement with performativity, their practices turn to languages in the threshold – languages that evolve and mutate in a continuous state of becoming.
British composer and activist Cornelius Cardew and American radical writer and poet Kathy Acker’s experiments with language serve as two key nodes for nervous systems, a term which functions as a double play: referring to languages as connective structures with a restless desire to push beyond and to society as a “nervous system” in which individual and collective rhythms and desires co-exist.
Jakob Kolding i Kunsthal Aarhus
Den danske kunstner Jakob Kolding om sit værk til Kunsthal Aarhus' udstilling Systemics #3: Against the idea of growth, towards poetry (or, how to build a universe that doesn't fall apart two days later).
How to build a universe that falls apart two days later er et nyt kunstværk skabt til Kunsthal Aarhus. Værket består af otte plakater, som er placeret på gulvet i stakke, hvorfra man frit kan tage dem med sig. Hver plakat har sin egen komposition, men alle følger samme grundstruktur. Idet de ophænges samlet -- som på rummets endevæg -- danner de et større mønster. Dette mønster kan i princippet fortsætte uendeligt i utallige kombinationer. Plakaterne kan kombineres frit på alle mulige måder, og mens de naturligvis kan ses enkeltvis, bliver den samlede komposition et valg for beskueren. Kompositionen afhænger af, hvordan man sammensætter dem, stedet, de hænges op og antallet af benyttede plakater. Værket er baseret på en simpel struktur: Hvert element er ligestillet, idet forholdet mellem de individuelle dele kontinuerligt bliver omformet. Værket realiseres gennem de forskellige versioner og sammenhænge, som opstår. Titlen på værket tager sit udgangspunkt i et foredrag og essay af den amerikanske science fiction-forfatter Philip K. Dick med titlen How to build a universe that doesn't fall apart two days later. I foredraget indrømmer Dick, at han egentlig foretrækker at skabe verdener, der netop falder fra hinanden igen. Verdener, hvor et autoritativt virkelighedssyn eller en sandhed bryder sammen, og hvor der ikke længere er en stabil orden. Det er en skepsis overfor ethvert dominerende system og en insisteren på værdien af ustabile og fragile positioner, der er afgørende. How to build a universe that falls apart two days later følger disse idéer. Værket har ikke en stabil færdig form men realiseres i takt med, at det spredes i nye versioner og sammenhænge. Indholdsmæssigt indeholder værket referencer til en række forskellige temaer eller verdener (eksempelvis økonomi, teknologi, natur og fiktion), der findes side om side og redefineres i deres skiftende forhold til hinanden. Vi møder et væld af konkrete, virtuelle, politiske, sociale, mytologiske, fiktive, mentale og psykologiske rum. Verdenskonstruktioner overlapper hinanden og systemer, ideologier og videnskaber eksisterer og falder fra hinanden på samme tid. Resultatet er en ikke-hierarkisk organisation, der ikke indeholder en linear læsning. Beskueren må bogstaveligt talt selv sætte den sammen.
The YOU MAY song in Aarhus Denmark
The YOU MAY show in Aarhus
From the opening KP14 at Kunsthal Aarhus (DK)
Video installation: a portrait, 200x110,
shown at Kunstnernes Påskeudstilling 2014 at Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus (DK)
View the video from the installation here:
Berlinde De Bruyckere EMBALMED – Kunsthal Aarhus / European Capital of Culture Aarhus 2017
Kunsthal Aarhus and European Capital of Culture Aarhus 2017 present the solo exhibition Embalmed by Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere.
In addition to the two existing works No Life Lost I, 2015 (2015) and No Life Lost II, 2015 (2015) the exhibition includes the new commission Embalmed – Twins, 2017 (2017) created for Kunsthal Aarhus.
Traditions of the Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting from the 16th century have exerted a profound influence upon Berlinde De Bruyckere’s art. Drawing from the legacies of the European Old Masters and Christian iconography, as well as mythology and cultural lore, the artist layers existing histories with new narratives suggested by contemporary world events to create a psychological terrain of pathos, tenderness and repulsion. De Bruyckere creates sculptural environments using casts made of wax, animal skins, hair, textiles, metal and wood, she renders haunting distortions of organic forms. De Bruyckere’s sculptures have a dual uncanny appearance of representing and embracing the poetic, beauty and elegance, and at the same time the decay, horror and fragility. In Kunsthal Aarhus’ three upper galleries De Bruyckere takes the viewer on a powerful journey of transformation, and haunting mutuality.
The exhibition is realised in collaboration with European Capital of Culture Aarhus 2017 and supported by Beckett-Fonden, the Embassy of Belgium in Denmark, Brussels Airlines, and Hauser & Wirth.
Exhibition period: 10 November 2017 – 21 January 2018
70 kager fra Danmark og Damaskus og svensk bålkaffe – Kagedag i Kunsthal Aarhus 16/5 2018
Creative ZOO besøgte Kunsthal Aarhus til Kagens Dag 16/5 2018.
Kunsthal Aarhus havde inviteret en række gæster til at servere noget særligt:
De syriske konditorer, familien Kweider, kom med Damaskus-kager og syrisk kaffe. Kaffeeksperten Thomas Sigfred lavede svensk bålkaffe ved Ronan & Erwan Bouroullecs bålsted. Madeksperten Fritøsen serverede unikke kager med navne som Super Carla, Konfetti, Hot Dog, Et stykke med rejer, From Russia with love, Mor, The Kiss og Blue Note.
Ny café på Banegårdspladsen, Århus
I området omkring banegården i Århus kommer der flere og flere restauranter og cafeer -- En af de helt nye er Café Rival som ligger i selve banegårdens bygning hvor der tidligere var bank -- Her har man forsøgt at bevare det originale look og dermed skabt lidt kultur i midtbyen. Vi talte med bestyrer Freja Nielsen.
Ny udstilling i Aarhus Kunstbygning
Aarhus Kunstbygning har frem til den 17. august 3 nye udstillinger bl.a. kunstprojektet Ønskegården for børn. Projektet undersøger hverdagen og den natur og kultur, der omgiver os alle. Med udgangspunkt i en bæredygtig tankegang eksperimenteres bl.a. med traditionelle produktionsformer på en nutidig måde og med kunstens klare indblanding.
Ulla von Brandenburg: It Has a Golden Sun and an Elderly Grey Moon, Part I & II – Kunsthal Aarhus
Kunsthal Aarhus and European Capital of Culture Aarhus 2017 present the first solo exhibition in Denmark by German artist Ulla von Brandenburg.
Ulla von Brandenburg explores her distinct visual language reflecting on the traditions and tropes of theatre and storytelling. Bringing together film, architecture and installation in von Brandenburg’s unique signature style, the exhibition takes its title from her latest work It Has a Golden Sun and an Elderly Grey Moon (2016) – a commission supported through a partnership of five organisations and reconfigurated for European Capital for Culture Aarhus 2017.
Von Brandenburg’s works, characterised by their use of curtains, costumes, props and staged settings, draw on a range of historical references, including the tableau vivant, modern theatre, folk traditions and iconic architecture. Combined with song and movement, these elements suggest a symbolic staging of ritualised encounters that are central to her oeuvre.
At Kunsthal Aarhus, the lower gallery becomes the stage for a site-specific installation that invites the visitor to navigate through a number of objects. Spread across the gallery floor like theatre props, the diverse ceramic, wooden or textile objects display von Brandenburg’s deep engagement with the traditions of craft. The central free standing wall becomes the screen for the exhibition’s eponymous 16 mm film It Has a Golden Sun and an Elderly Grey Moon. It captures a performance played out across a staircase installed on the stage of the Amandiers Theatre in Nanterre, France. Monochromatic in its setting, the scene is punctuated by the choreographed movement of several dancers who perform in a sequence, holding variously coloured sheets of fabric in front of them. The distribution of objects and actions within the space, the ways bodies move and act recall to memory ancient rituals and gestures anchored deeply in the collective consciousness. Becoming staged rites and rituals related to gift-giving, the performed notions of exchange also reveal the aesthetic in human interactions.
It Has a Golden Sun and an Elderly Grey Moon, Part I & II is co-commissioned by: Aarhus 2017, Denmark; ACCA, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Australia; Nanterre-Amandiers, Centre Dramatique National, Nanterre, France; PAMM, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, USA; Pilar Corrias London, London, United-Kingdom; The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, Canada; Produzentengalerie Hamburg, Germany; Art: Concept, Paris, France; DRAC Nord-Pas-de-Calais / Picardie, France; La Fonderie Darling, Montréal, Canada.
Textile sponsored by Kvadrat
Exhibition period: 10 November 2017 – 25 February 2018
SLUB Live Coding performance Aarhus Kunsthal Alex McLean Dave Griffiths
Very cool experience! It lasted almost an hour so this is only a very short piece of the long performance.
Talende runesten på Vikingemuseet i Århus
R Y Sirb performance: Workers of the World at Kunsthal Aarhus, 19 February 2014
Sound performance by the Curator and Acting Director of the Museum of Ordure, R Y Sirb, at Kunsthal Aarhus, 19 February 2014.
The performance accompanied the launch of a new book presenting over 100 covers of The Communist Manifesto, compiled by the Museum of Ordure from its collection. The book is turned inside out to draw attention to its
material form and historical conditions: the covers have fascinating stories to tell of hopes and anticipated futures - for instance, in their use of particular imagery and in the signs of wear through human use and draw attention to the excesses of capitalist production. This notion of excess is fundamental to the overall project of the Museum of Ordure in its attention to the management of human waste and identification of ordure. What value do readers place upon the Manifesto in a situation where radical politics appears to have been reduced to commodity form,
nostalgia or mere curiosity?
Museum of Ordure is a 'self-institution' which has a special interest in the management of human waste and its impact on the concept of the public sphere and civil society.
ordure.org/
Georgios Papadopoulos Money Talk Kunsthal Aarhus
Georgios Papadopoulos participates in Kunsthal Aarhus' exhibition Systemics #3: Against the idea of growth, towards poetry (or, how to build a universe that doesn't fall apart two days later) 16 January-30 March 2014.
Georgios Papdopoulos was invited to do the talk: DEMOCRATIZING MONEY: ALTERNATIVE CURRENCIES AS A STEP TOWARDS MORE EQUITABLE AND JUST COMMUNITIES and the seminar ECONOMICS AND THE ARTIST.
One of the main challenges of the financial collapse of 2008 is to put the monetary system under democratic control without compromising the wellbeing of the society. The idea of re-organizing the economic system on more equitable and just principles by introducing an alternative system of economic exchange and valuation has been tried before, but the crisis has given new impetus to the idea.
In the presentation Georgios Papadopoulos reflects on the importance of alternative currencies both as means of alleviating economic hardship and as experiments in the collective control of the economy. The cultural sector will be a point of focus since it is strongly affected by the economic downturn and also because alternative systems of exchange and support have been part of the exceptional economy of the arts. Artistic practice has been experimenting with the economy and can provide important insights for the workings both for the mainstream system of market exchange and for its alternatives.
Georgios Papadopoulos combines economics, philosophical analysis and aesthetics with an exploratory artistic practice. His research gravitates around money and its socioeconomic functions. He studied Philosophy of Economics at the London School of Economics, and is pursuing a PhD at the Erasmus University. In 2008 and 2009 Papadopoulos was a researcher at the theory department of Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, and in 2012 was awarded the Vilém Flusser Residency for Artistic Research from the School of Fine Arts and the Transmediale festival in Berlin. His next project on the iconography of alternative currencies will be inaugurated in quartier21 at the MuseumsQuartier in Vienna.
Sall. Performance Piece at Mørke Dage Post Event Aarhus
Darkness. Blackness. Womanhood. Manhood. Child-hood.
I got to discover another facet, a more natural facet of the unknown, the obscure, of the dark with Sall. My beloved Sall. She showed me how not to fear it (the dark), how to co-exist in its force, how to dwell in its bed, how to kiss its indigo nights, how to see myself in that mirror, how to lose myself in pain and return more alive, how to embody the sorrow in and out and the madness. Madness. That I comprehend barefoot in the forest where insanity came aligned with rain drops, the green of the leaves, the brown of the dry moss. I shouted in the ocean expunging all the anger I had in my throat keeping me from voicing. I shouted again crying all the rage out celebrating in the ocean, hoping that the birds will understand my song.
This interactive performance seeks to initiate the audience into exploring artistic expressions relating darkness, surrealism, imaginary universes, the relation between machine and human being, human emotions and reactions, human madness, embodied pain and meltdown.
Performed in Aarhus, Denmark at the Mørke Dage Post Event 2016