The five Copenhagen art venues behind the 2012 Copenhagen Art Festival – Den Frie, Gl. Strand, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Nikolaj Kunsthal, and Overgaden – are once again working together on an new exhibition, which they will present in the autumn of 2015.
A press release issued by Copenhagen Art Festival today states that the five art centres “have endeavoured to create a new format that will once again offer the citizens and visitors of Copenhagen a high-profile encounter with the latest art from the national and international arenas.” It is worth noting that this time the term “Copenhagen Art Festival” seems to be used only as a reference pointing to “the past partnership about the art festival” rather than as the official framework of the upcoming project.
Unlike the 2012 edition, the new exhibition has a curator in charge of the overall project: Sonia Dermience (b. 1961) from Belgium. In 2002 Dermience was one of the co-founders of the curating collective Komplot in Brussels. Since 2010 the Komplot collective, which works with “nomadic creative practices”, has resided in a remodelled warehouse dedicated to exhibitions, residencies, and artists’ studios. Among other things, Dermience has carried out extensive research on collaborative art movements in Belgium since 1968.
Dermience wishes to focus on “our current age as a time of economic and political instability and to pick up the discussion about the postmodern. What makes a society – locally, and from a wider perspective?”
As yet, the child has no name. The scope of the project is at this point unknown – we do not know whether this is yet another attempt at creating a Copenhagen biennial from a new angle of approach, nor whether the exhibition will also, like the 2012 Copenhagen Art Festival, involve the public, or how the institutions will collaborate. The art venues involved promise that the months to come will bring more information about the exhibition concept and names of artists.
