An exhibition of works in the landscape by the photographer Søren Rønholt and unique ceramic works by Gurli Elbækgaard.
Naturens Resonans
Danske Kunsthåndværkers & Designere
Officinet, Bredgade 66, København
the exhibition continues until 20 September 2020
A new exhibition has opened on the entrance courtyard of Designmuseum Danmark with works selected by Designers' Nest and Designmuseum Danmark.
The museum remains closed for extensive work to the building due to be completed in 2022 but there is access to the courtyard.
the love scene & the balancing act
Courtney Makins
sugarcoated cotton houndstooth, wool tartan and ripstop
the red bride
Amina Saada
polyester satin and foam
follow4follow
Oliver Opperman
recycled polyester and dead-stock neoprene
people go to work
Fredrik Stålhandske
cardboard and polyester
east meets west
Ishara Jayathilake
screen-printed cotton canvas
Absent Bodies continues on the entrance courtyard of
Designmuseum Danmark, Bredgade ,Copenhagen
until 22 November 2020
An exhibition in the great courtyard in front of the entrance to the parliament building.
Slotsholm is a large and almost square island with canals on three side and the harbour on the fourth side. The natural island was much smaller than the present extent of Slotsholm and was the site of an early-medieval castle of which parts remain below the present parliament building. The castle was extended and the island enlarged and became the main royal palace in the city. There were royal stables here and a church and a complex development of buildings dating back to the early 17th century that housed government officials and administrative buildings and store rooms for the state … so, for instance, the 17th-century arsenal for the navy. After a major fire in the late 18th-century the royal family decamped to Amalienborg and decided to remain there and, although the large royal palace was rebuilt, it became the home of the Danish parliament although the great State Apartments at Christiansborg are still used for major royal events.
The photographs and text in the exhibition look at not just the main buildings of the first great royal palace and parliament on the island but includes fascinating facts and social and political history that reveals much about how the Danish monarchy and democratic government in Denmark has evolved.
Access to the exhibition is at any time as the courtyard and the route through Christiansborg is open to all pedestrians and cyclists.
There are tours of Slotsholmen with guides from Teatermuseet i Hofteatret / the Theatre Museum and the Court Theatre.
the exhibition and tours continue until 6 December 2020
I first saw this exhibition in 2017 when it opened in Copenhagen on the harbour quay at Islands Brygge. and since then it has toured the country.
The display stands have been changed and there seem to be more and larger photographs so the exhibition here runs right around the central garden of Kongens Nytorv.
This is a fascinating survey of experiences and attitudes and not least because I’m a foreign incomer too although, in comparison, my journey was simple and straightforward as a EU citizen.
Many of these stories tell of hardship and the determination that was needed just to get to Denmark and some hint at real dangers in escaping persecution or wars. All of them talk about how Danish they feel or if and how the culture of the country of their birth had or still has an influence on how they live or how they feel now about the country they have made their home.
The participants come from 29 countries and were selected to represent a range of ages, religions, and backgrounds and were photographed by Maja Eriksen for this Copenhagen International Theatre project.
Fang din by / Capture Your City - an annual photographic competition and exhibition - opened on 25 June on the square in front of the Danish Architecture Center and will continue here until 7 October 2020.
The theme set for this year was everyday magic with the photographers looking at the buildings and landscape of the city as it frames our lives.
As always, a large number of photographers from all over the country submitted their work and this exhibition, selected by a jury, shows 55 of the photographs with three winners selected from the open competition and the three selected from the separate competition for schools.
Fang din by, Dansk Arkitektur Center,
Bryghuspladsen 10, Copenhagen
continues until 7 October 2020
There is an exhibition on the square in front of BLOX for the annual Danish Design Awards that were announced on the 11th June.
Presumably this was planned for the lobby of the DI building so obviously there were compromises to move it to an outdoor space but the display panels now have hefty concrete bases and this means that they are much too high …. I am over 6ft tall and even I found it a painful, neck-stretching business to read the upper part of each panel …. surely an odd mistake for the Design Centre to make. The web site from the Design Center for the Awards is good but the odd scattering of display panels across this public space - designed to be seen by a team of basketball players - misses an opportunity to get the information across to a wider number of people.
the exhibition on the square continues at
BLOX, Bryghuspladsen, 1473 København K
until 23 June 2020
An exhibition of works by the Danish sculptor Amalie Jakobsen who lives and works in Berlin.
There are four large sculptures with interlocking ellipses in steel and aluminium - three in the entrance lobby of Politikens Hus - at the north-east corner of Rådhuspladsen - the square of the city hall - and the largest work installed on the square itself.
the exhibition continues until 15 August 2020
There is an exhibition in Rigsdagsgården - in the courtyard in front of parliament - to mark the anniversary of the reunification of Denmark in June and July 1920.
Photographs of documents and old maps and letters from the period come from the State Archive and there are contemporary images and photographs of newspaper articles along with short texts for explanation in Danish and the same screens are repeated but with an English text.
This was a crucial event in Danish history that explains much about the character and the politics of modern Denmark.
The Schleswig problem was caused by a potent and destructive mix of history, different inheritance laws, the fact that Holstein, Lauenburg and Schleswig were ostensibly independent duchies and that not only did many of the Danes in the area speak German as their first language but the whole thing was caught up in the rise and rise of an independent and then a unified Germany and with that the wider politics of alliances and the 'diplomacy' of other European states concerned with containing or allying with or opposing the different players for power and influence.
Schleswig was lost in the devastating war against Prussia and Austria in 1864 - the Second Schleswig War.
The outcome was devastating for Denmark because - in the key battle at Dybbøl Banke in April 1864 - 1,800 Danish soldiers were killed and 3,000 taken prisoner and, in the Peace Treaty of October 1864, Denmark was forced to renounce all claim to the duchies and, as a consequence, the country lost a third of its territory and 40% of its population.
With the defeat of Germany in 1918, at the Versailles Conference between January and June 1919, European powers negotiated peace and resolved an armistice, and, for Denmark, regaining control of at least some of the lost territory became a reality.
Rather than returning to historic land borders, it was agreed that there should be a referendum or plebiscite with three zones to allow for self determination.
The German-speaking areas of Holstein and Lauenburg in the south remained under German control and the north part of Schleswig chose, with 80% of the vote, to return to Denmark.
There had been some hope that Southern Schleswig - particularly the town of Flensburg with a large Danish-speaking minority - might either vote to return to Danish control or be placed under the League of Nations as a semi-autonomous territory but on 15 June 1920 a new border north of Flensburg was agreed and the formal date of the reunification was marked on 9th July 1920 when the Danish king, Christian X, signed the Act on the Inclusion of the Regions of Southern Jutland and at 9.20 a.m. on 10th July, on horseback, crossed the old border at Frederikshøj and entered the returned Danish territory.
This is an exhibition to mark twenty years of CLAYDIES …... the working partnership of the potters Tine Broksø and Karen Kjældgård-Larsen.
It's a brilliant show with all the humour and the self parody you would expect from CLAYDIES …. where else would you be encouraged to have your photograph taken behind a ceramic string vest or apparently 'wearing' a swishing pleated skirt or with your head stuck through a large ceramic collar?
Behind the fun, of course, is their very real understanding of ceramic techniques and their very real skill. For a start, some of these pots are huge and must have been a headache to fire and there is the use of a wide range of glazes that are exploited for different strong colours and different effects. You can’t get away with taking a gentle dig at your craft unless you have mastered it.
The two large ceramic collars are hung at the right height for sticking your face through for a portrait. One has grey/blue glaze reminiscent of tin-glazed earthenware - white ceramics with thin painted lines and simple decoration in blue that were presumably the early precursors of Copenhagen Royal pottery - and the other, with a lattice of basket work, in the style of what was called cream ware or in England Queen's Ware in the 18th century. Remember, Karen Kjældgård-Larsen has designed for Royal Copenhagen where she took a fresh look at their traditional blue and white patterns and then came up with a giant and fragmented version of the decoration to bring the china to the attention of new and younger buyers.
There are elements here in the exhibition of the cartoon … so about making something exaggerated or slightly absurd to make us look in a new way at aspects of ceramics that are too often just taken for granted. Of course it's obvious that the spout of a teapot points upwards but how and when and why did the form of a teapot become so firmly established? Are certain forms of tableware like they are just because that's a sort of ultimate and definitive shape or size or is it simply because that's what we, the customer, have come to expect and anything else, anything unconventional, would be difficult to sell?
I was going to make a joke about brewing tea and brewer’s droop but then I’ve been told by several Danish friends that Danes think puns are a particularly odd and not very clever form of British humour. So, maybe it’s enough to say here, that some of the pieces are poking gentle fun at some of these lazy conventions.
There is also an interesting attempt to break down the border between mass culture and 'high culture' where an object in a museum is to be revered in part because it is in a museum. One of the pieces is a ceramic T shirt with blue sleeves that has the obligatory logo on the breast but here the CLAYDIES ceramic mark. You can’t get much more mass culture than a T shirt with a logo.
And also, of course, above all, this is a brilliant but gentle dig at the obsession with selfies. It’s a bit like that old fairground or end-of-the-pier seaside attraction where your photo was taken by a street photographer but with your face stuck through a hole in a picture of a very very large lady wearing a striped bathing costume standing next to a scrawny little husband so your face replaces hers. Here there is a patterned knitted jumper but made in clay to stand behind or a pottery bobble hat.
Having said all that, the exhibition here is slightly restrained for CLAYDIES. In 2013, for their show called This is Not a Joke, they produced ceramic eyeballs to be left in bowls of soup and whoopee cushions; an unpleasantly realistic piece with the title SHIT; joke teeth; a delicate and refined tea cup but when tipped up to the mouth it had what looked like a pigs snout painted on the bottom and a scarf called BOOBS. Follow the link to see why all this is difficult to describe.
With these big bold ceramics set against big bold strong colours, this exhibition is where pot art meets pop art.
claydiesselfies continues at Officinet until 28 March 2020
Danske Kunsthåndværkere & Designere
This project from SPACE10 was undertaken with the Indian design lab Quicksand. They visited 40 families in Kenya, Peru, Indonesia and India to look at how little or no access to electricity restricts or controls day-to-day life and limits opportunities.
With limited incomes, several families who were interviewed spent available money on improving or constructing a more secure and solid home - above any priority for electricity - but then used power, often solar power, first for charging mobile phones as that gave them access, for the first time, to banking and to ways of selling their produce at more competitive rates.
Lighting for safety or security and for extending the working day is important and it was interesting to see that some preferred to continue with traditional forms of cooking on open fires rather than buying stoves that can be expensive and unreliable. It was not just that fridges and electric stoves could be expensive to repair but the supply of electricity could be intermittent or unreliable or family income could be unpredictable so some form of backup like kerosene was kept for when the family could not pay for electricity.
Here, in the exhibition, there are photographs from the project with extended captions that set out the difficult choices that many people have to make when they do not have access to reliable or affordable or safe energy.
Life Without Energy: Needs, Dreams and Aspirations - is the report that came out of the research project and it can be read on line.
the exhibition Life Without Energy
continues at SPACE10 until 17 April
read the report Life Without Energy: Needs, Dreams and Aspirations
In the World there are around 2 billion people with restricted access to electricity and of those there are as many as 860 million people with no access to electric power of any form.
Access to affordable, reliable and sustainable energy is one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 along with efforts to improve sanitation, nutrition and access to safe water.
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