What not to miss during Cph Art Week?
Cph Art Week is the first Art Week of the new season, and equals 11 days of performances, concerts, exhibitions, openings and parties at over 70 participating locations. So where to start? To make it easy, we’ve listed up ten things you shouldn’t miss when in Copenhagen the next week!
Christian Marclay’s The Clock at Copenhagen Contemporary
Christian Marclay – The Clock, 2010. Photo: Ben Westoby © White Cube
Christian Marclay’s The Clock – widely recognised as a contemporary masterpiece – is now for the first time on view in Scandinavia. The Clock is a 24-hour montage comprising thousands of scenes from film and television that feature everything from wristwatches to clocktowers, from buzzing alarms to the cuckoo clock – along with other references to the time. Marclay deconstructs and challenges the narratives of individual scenes by removing them from their original context and inserting them into another, where time itself becomes the protagonist. Synchronised with the local time of the exhibition space, the work conflates cinematic and actual time, revealing each passing minute as a repository of alternately suspenseful, tragic or romantic narrative possibilities. During the Copenhagen Art Week – on 1 September – there’s a special 24-hour screenings of The Clock, where audiences can experience the work in its entirety, covering the full span of a day and night.
Trangravsvej 10–12
Copenhagen
Through 03 September
Torbjørn Rødland at Nils Stærk
This exhibition – already Rødland’s fifth solo with the gallery since 2001- comprises two distinct series. Fence Studies is a series of six small works in which different materials are experienced through their combination. Wordless consists of five larger photographs, each showing a human head held by a pair of older hands. The relationships between the persons touching and the persons touched are unclear.
Glentevej 49
Copenhagen
26 August – 21 October
Chart Art Fair
Chart Art Fair was founded in 2013 by five Copenhagen-based galleries – Galleri Susanne Ottesen, Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, V1 Gallery, Andersen’s Contemporary and David Risley Gallery – with the aim to challenge the boundaries and experience of a traditional art fair. For their 5th edition, Chart returns to Kunsthal Charlottenborg with a strong showing of Nordic galleries. The selection and curation is realised by the five founding galleries, resulting in a small fair with 33 participating galleries. We are especially looking forward to Yves Scherer at Rod Bianco, A Kassen and Cornelia Baltes at Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Alicja Kwade at i8 Gallery, Franz West at Peter Lund, Gardar Eide Einarsson at V1 Gallery and Nina Beier at Croy Nielsen!
Chart Art Fair is also setting up a large scale public art project with French artist and Turner-prize winner Laure Prouvost. Since the beginning of August, the streets of Copenhagen are filled with 2.000 posters, billboards and balcony banners with images of a new series of 12 artworks by Prouvost. They depict tactile body parts combined with enigmatic phrases that contradict our traditional expectations that art must express grand existential concerns.
Kunsthal Charlottenburg
Nyhavn
Copenhagen
31 August – 03 september
Nástio Mosquito at Cph Art Week
Nástio Mosquito – Respectable Thief, 2016. Live Performance at World Breakers. Photo: Alessandro Sala © Cesura
Cph Art Week invited Nástio Mosquito as this year’s city artist. Mosquito is known for making seductive and provocative works that, with humorous flair and political attitude, examine the human condition on our globalised world. As part of Cph Art Week, Mosquito presents a selection of his most radical performances, concerts, video installations and interventions throughout tje city. He opened Cph Art Week with his performance piece Respectable Thief – a compelling manifestation which, in its essence, celebrates the productive and well-articulated wrath through a spectacular and intense release of music, video, words and poetry. Also keep your eyes open for his video-installations Nástia’s Manifesto and Ser Humano.
Throughout the city
Academy of Tal R at Louisiana
Academy of Tal R presents a colourful and motley overview of the artist’s entire artistic career since then his showing his work for the first time in Louisiana twenty years after ago. The exhibition title should be understood as a mildly humorous provocation, since Tal R’s artwork always appears free, wild, searching, vital and simply unacademic. Through an overview of his work from the past twenty years and a series of new works, the exhibition shows that Tal R from the outset has been a storyteller with a special eye for the overlooked, hidden and repressed spaces of modern life.
Academy of Tal R rounds round off the Louisiana trilogy of contemporary artists with painting as their central practice, after Daniel Richter last year and Peter Doig the year before that.
Gl. Strandvej 13
Humlebæk
Through 10 September
Misaki Kawai at V1 Gallery
Misaki Kawai created Romantic Melody – her second solo exhibition at the gallery – during a three-month residency in an old naval museum in Copenhagen. Kawai combines the magical with the mundane, pursuing a direct expression from brain to hand, trying to shortcut conscious and intentional stylistic decisions. Her work is bold, colourful, spontaneous and driven by artistic intuition. Her visual language – influenced by east and west – combines humor with tragedy, reality with dream, conflict with harmony.
Flæsketorvet 69 – 71
Copenhagen
Through 09 September
Code Art Fair
It’s only the second time this new art fair is taking place, but they’re already hosting an impressive selection of 75 international galleries – including top London galleries such as Arcadia Missa, Carlos/Ishikawa, and Arcade; Germany’s KOW, Tobias Naehring; König and Neu; as well Mexico City’s Proyectos Monclova. The fair is taken place in the large glass atrium court of Bella Center – a twenty minute bike ride from the city center. The last day of the fair, on Sunday 3 September, the fair will move into the heart of the city with a spectacular, collective musical performance by Italian artist Marinella Senatore. Be sure not to miss that performance!
Center Blvd. 5
Copenhagen
31 Augutus – 03 September
Cornelia Baltes at Galleri Nicolai Wallner
CAPRI is Cornelia Baltes’ first solo exhibition at the gallery. Evoking feelings of summer, sun and nostalgia, she invites us into a world where everything feels intensified. Summer is a season that plays by its own set of rules—it is exotic, it is energising and it is something we think and fantasise about year-round. Summer has the potential to answer all of our problems or, at the very least, to provide us with a kind of temporary escape. But summer also comes with an end date, thus each of its days is contextualised by a need to maximise them to the fullest. In this sense it becomes a state of mind, balancing a desire to do everything with a need to do everything. In CAPRI, each of Baltes’ paintings play on these emotions. Moving beyond the canvas, the works are immersive and captivating, creating an infectious feeling. Baltes shows us fleeting glimpses of bare skin and a sun burn, a pair of flip flops, legs, pool toys, water splashing and more abstract elements that come together to tease us, to show us what we are missing, and to ask us to join in.
Glentevej 47- 49
Copenhagen
26 August – 14 October
Ai Wei Wei at Kunsthal Charlottenburg
Ai Wei Wei – Soleil Levant, 2017. Installation view at Kunsthal Charlottenborg. Photo: David Stjernholm
Ai Weiwei’s Soleil Levant is a new installation, produced specifically for Kunsthal Charlottenborg. For just over 100 days, 3500 salvaged life jackets collected from refugees arriving at the Greek Island of Lesbos are barricading the windows of the Kunsthal. The name of the work stems from Claude Monet’s painting Impression, Soleil Levant from 1872, which depicts the harbour in Le Havre at the end of the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian war. Whereas Monet’s landscape painting captures the political and social reality of its time with its cranes, steamboats and industrialisation, Ai Weiwei’s Soleil Levant draws attention to to the refugee crisis currently taking place across Europe.
Nyhavn
Copenhagen
Through 01 October.
Mark Leckey at Statens Museum for Kunst
Mark Leckey – He Thrusts his Fists against the Posts but Still Insists he Sees the Ghosts, 2017. Installation view at SMK Museum. Photo: Jan Søndergaard
Inspired by recollections of a motorway bridge from his own childhood, Mark Leckey takes over the Statens Museum’s x-room venue with a especially produced total installation. According to Leckey, all his works are a kind of exorcism – the urge to create a work arises when something becomes too toxic and must be expelled and eradicated. With the exhibition he invites us to join him in returning to a very distinctive place from his own childhood: the ramps underneath the M53 motorway bridge in Ellesmere Port where he and his friends hung out in the early 1970s.
Sølvgade 48-50
Copenhagen
Through 03 September
Landon Metz at Andersen’s Contemporary
Landon Metz’ works centers around a deep interest in the material and immaterial functions of a studio-based practice: approaching each aspect of his process as a viable medium itself. Central for Metz is his elegant stained-canvas works that features an increasingly spare vocabulary of biomorphic forms splayed across the picture plane. For his second solo exhibition at the gallery, Landon Metz will introduce different media forms to express the traditional painting through new forms. The exhibition will presents paintings, sculptures and film installations, that all seek to explores painting’s ability to express itself outside of the traditional canvas.
Amaliegade 40
Copenhagen
30 August – 23 September
COLLECT ART BY NASTIO MOSQUITO
Nástio Mosquito
M.F.H.N.S. (#2) (Authority & Identity), 2016
(40 x 30 cm – Edition of 12 copies, signed and numbered by the artist on a certificate)
COLLECT ART BY LAURE PROUVOST
Laure Prouvost
Ideally this print …, 2016
(45 x 60 cm – Edition of 30 copies, signed and numbered by the artist)
Laure Prouvost
It Calms us Both 2, 2014
(2 prints of 45 x 60 cm – Edition of 10 copies, signed and numbered by the artist)
and plenty more …