Autumn 2022 program

Established in the late 1980s as an artists’ space for emerging voices, O—Overgaden remains one of the only art institutions in Denmark focusing on younger artists, local as well as international, by co-producing and presenting major new productions.

From its canal-side premises in a former printing house in inner-city Copenhagen, this autumn O displays the first large institutional shows by Tora Schultz and Isabella Solar Villaseca, while the current exhibitions by Marie Kølbæk Iversen and Helene Nymann continue from each artist’s year-long research.

All four shows are accompanied by new editions in O’s ongoing publication series, in print as well as online, designed by Amsterdam/Copenhagen-based fanfare, with voices including Adam Khalil (talking to Iversen), Siri Hustvedt (talking to Nymann), and Laura McLean-Ferris (forthcoming, on Schultz).

In addition, O’s associate research fellow Cally Spooner expands her series of itinerant rehearsals (most recently at Centre Pompidou), followed by conversations onsite at O, with director Rhea Dall and readings of writing-in-progress by Will Holder. Spooner will churn this material into a text series released in five consecutive issues of Mousse Magazine, starting this October.

Finally, O continues to host AYE-AYE, an independent project space by Nina Beier and Simon Dybbroe Møller, on the first floor, in what used to be the directorial office.

Upcoming

Tora Schultz: Bitch on Wheels
November 19 2022–January 29 2023
With zealous sarcasm and diligent material detail, Tora Schultz’s sculptural practice unveils the structural violence in some of society’s most common furniture. The subtle machismo behind the strappings of an armchair; the privileging of a (super) male body in the making of crash test dummies resulting in non-conforming bodies being more likely to die in a car crash; the classification of women as ill-tempered, vampish “bitches on wheels”; and the original sin repeated in “Eva” technology (Eva is the Danish spelling of Eve)—these are all elements of Schultz’s first grand-scale solo exhibition, opening at O in November.

Isabella Solar Villaseca: Memory Marketplace
November 19 2022–January 29 2023
The emotional catch of the protest song—the folkloric beat—is scrutinized in Isabella Solar Villaseca’s practice. In her new film she walks back through her Chilean descent and Swedish upbringing in diasporic communities, singing and dancing to evoke the Patria lost to fascism. She zooms in on the knife-edge balance between propaganda-like “tools” of local hymns and the South American tradition of solidarity, collecting footage spanning current protests in Chile to the 1973 coup and a soundtrack of Latin American folklore and protest anthems.

Current

Marie Kølbæk Iversen: Rovhistorier (Histories of Predation)
August 27–October 23 2022
Marie Kølbæk Iversen’s show traces her own family history back to her foremother Johanne Thygesdatter who in the 1870s saw the regional tales and tongue of Midwestern Jutland coerced as the Danish periphery was subjugated to centralized, national rule. Iversen interlaces East-Atlantic folktales of merpeople, the rise of capitalism, colonial governance, and new research on the longest-living known vertebrate, the gurry shark—Havkalen (“the merman”). Enlarging microscopic scans of the eye lens of said shark, which may live to become at least three centuries old, grand abstract projections function as a speculative time machine to this predatory history witnessed by the shark; a scene occasionally activated by the artist singing folk songs from her rural ancestry.

Helene Nymann: Knots of Ecphore
August 27–October 23 2022
In her current neuroscientific research, Helene Nymann asks questions around the “knot”: how do bodily ties change our capacity to remember and forget; how is memory’s close cousin, knowledge, stored haptically, as when knitted into the birthing body enmeshed with the newborn; in tied strings, such as the Inca khipu; or in organic shapes, such as the sea slug Aplysia californica. In Knots of Ecphore, a grand video installation, Kluddermor (Mesh Mother), shows three bodies interwoven, just as in the schoolyard game; meanwhile visitors are invited to their own act of intertwinement by tying a knot and placing it in a sculptural landscape.

Team: Rhea Dall, Director; Aukje Lepoutre Ravn, Curator; Vera Østrup, Events Curator; Maria Kamilla Larsen, Press Coordinator; Toke Martins, Installation Manager.

Support: O—Overgaden’s main funder is the Danish Arts Foundation. Further generous supporters are the Aage and Johanne Louis-Hansen Foundation, the Augustinus Foundation, the New Carlsberg Foundation, Beckett-Fonden, and the A.P. Møller and Chastine Mc-Kinney Møller Foundation. The specific projects mentioned have received further support from the Novo Nordisk Foundation, the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills, the Arne V. Schleschs Foundation, the Nordic Culture Fund, the Lemvigh-Müller Foundation, and Minister Erna Hamilton’s Grant.