Har du lyst til at deltage i et unikt forskningsprojekt om klimapsykologi og bæredygtigheds-dannelse?

ARIEL er involveret i det tværfaglige forskningsprojekt “I økologiske kriser: Omsorg mellem generationer og arter”, som søger deltagere, der oplever det udfordrende at være i en verden, hvor klimaforandringer og økologiske kriser træder stadigt tydeligere frem, og hvor samtalen på tværs af generationer kan gå skævt.

Ved at deltage bidrager du til ny viden om, hvordan vi kan udvikle psykologiske tilgange og stærke fællesskaber, så vi bedre kan håndtere de udfordringer, kriserne skaber.

Fra slut marts til slut november 2025 mødes grupper á seks deltagere (to grupper i alt) ni gange i løbet af perioden. Sammen vil deltagerne udforske og være med til gradvist at omdanne et nedlagt landbrugsareal på ca. 5 hektar til et naturområde, alt imens de undersøger, hvordan sansninger af jorden og det mere-end-menneskelige liv påvirker deres oplevelser.

Projektet er støttet af AUFF-NOVA-bevilling. Ledes af Malou Juelskjær, lektor og ph.d. ved Institut for Pædagogik og Uddannelse, Aarhus Universitet.

Projektet samarbejder med Klimapsykologisk Ungdomsforening og Foreningen Skovgro (www.skovgro.dk), stiller deres natur(gen)oprettelsesprojekt i Odsherred til rådighed og inddrager os i nogle af deres aktiviteter på arealet.

Vil du vide mere/tilmelde dig? (Senest 26/2) Send en mail til: klimapsyk@edu.au.dk eller via projekt-hjemmesiden: https://projekter.au.dk/deltag-i-projektet

We are pleased to enter into a long-term collaboration with the artist-run platform lím collective based in Aalborg. Throughout the spring, ARIEL has been engaged as a curatorial partner in several of lím collective's productions, including the lím artist placement at Fountain House Enggården in Thy.

lím collective is a platform dedicated to critical and experimental artistic voices working on health, care and resistance. In 2025 we are launching a programme together in collaboration with Aalborg Midwifery Center at Aalborg University Hospital. The collaboration consists of the development and implementation of an exhibition program for 2025. Nina Wöhlk from ARIEL is the curator of the program, which has the tentative title "Birthing Bodies".

Sustained collaborations are key to ARIEL's wellbeing. With lím collective as working partners we can go deeper into our ongoing commitment to questions of access, accountability, ressources, distribution and radical pedagogy as ways to nuance intersectional feminism in public discourses. As part of our collaboration we will engage with lím collectives Arts/Care development program for the artists participating in the program. We also aim to facilitate an internal process for the staff at the Midwifery Center to ensure a healthy process and future integration.

It is our pleasure to present Thinking Like a Forest - new social practices. A new monthly series of talks and workshops which will mediate regenerative thinking, practices, and methods in the arts and cultural field. The project responds to current social and environmental challenges and the urgent need to support more sustainable ways of practice and being in the world.

People from different fields are invited to unfold their practice and work. We will speak about time, balance and pauses, power, ego, humility, biases, nourishment, agency, vulnerability and care. We will gather new ideals and narratives about regenerative work life and leadership in the time we live in. New futures and narratives, repair and language for the necessary change, community, empathy, learning, critical thinking and listening, diversity and shifts in perspectives are available in the arts and artistic thinking. We will be guided by research questions that will connect the personal to the environment and the present to the future we wish to see.

The gulf between the world as we know it and the world as we would like it to be is a space of uncertainty - full of confusion and doubt. Productive confusion can be a state that creates new wholes. By sitting with regenerative thoughts, methods, and practices from the arts and cultural field we want to give them social, economical, physiological and cultural space in our institutions and practices.

The series is held in a smaller semi-public format. Limited seating and participation by sign-up.

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The first session will be held on Sunday March 3, from 1-2.30pm and will be with Malou Juelskjær, Associate Professor of Social Psychology at Aarhus University and co-founder of the association Skovgro.

Drawing on concrete and down-to-earth experiences, the event will explore connectedness and responsibility - and thus also power processes, ethics, and (social) justice, by examining how one (as a researcher, artist, curator, individual) is not separate from the subject one wishes to address.

The exhibition Fear and Fauna focuses on the intersection between race- and gender-based violence and the violence against the more-than-human while simultaneously bringing new perspectives on liberation and mobilization on an individual and collective level.

As the title indicates, the exhibition looks to a crucial juxtaposition between ‘fear’ – seen as a decisive indicator of intersectional inequality – and a critique of the historical use and conceptualization of ‘fauna’, originally formulated by the Swedish scientist, Carl von Linné, the founder of modern taxonomy and ecology, who, in the categorization of the world's animal kingdom, also was behind the division of humanity into racial types.

Through a critical techno-ecological feminist lense, Fear and Fauna presents works by nine Danish and international artists: Gina Arizpe, Hanni Kamaly, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Karim Boumjimar, Sall Lam Toro, Marina Dubia, Ida Lissner, Gro Sarauw and Anni Garza Lau with Ghost Agency.

The exhibition revolves around practices of resistance dealing with killing, violence and inequality as a global phenomenon, happening in both virtual and physical realities across class differences, cultures, and geography. The exhibition shows that gendered and minoritized violence takes place in all spaces; the intimate, the public, and the physical as well as digital fora. 

In six connecting rooms, the audience encounters the complex issues at hand through poetic and sensuous intel. By assembling works that emote experiences of subjugated bodies in contemporary societies, the exhibition questions issues regarding class, power, bodily autonomy, the role of science under concurrent and historic colonial rule, tech-patriarchy, wet-/hardware, and much more.

In a variety of mediums such as sculpture, 3D-animation, performance, painting, VR, video, and installation, the exhibition pursues the imaginary with the agency, love, beauty, and power that it entails. With fierce images of resistance, the exhibition raises subversive notions and historical re-examinations that positions digital life as a catalyst in a larger revolt, and how this together with other communities can lead to mobilization, hope and liberation.

The exhibition Fear and Fauna is initiated by and made in collaboration with the newly started nonprofit exhibition platform, Dag Hammarskjölds Allé 42D, 4th floor.

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PERFORMANCE PROGRAM:

– Thursday 4 May, 5-8pm. A Matter of Time. Durational performance by Gina Arizpe

– Sunday 7 May, 1-2pm. A Matter of Time. Durational performance by Gina Arizpe

– Wednesday 14 June, 7pm and 8pm. Obsidian Dream Love Letters: Vol. 2 by Sall Lam Toro

– Wednesday 7 June, 2-6pm. A Matter of Time. Durational performance by Gina Arizpe



PUBLIC PROGRAM:

– Sunday 7 May, 2-4pm: ARI. Readings #Fear and Fauna I.

– Wednesday 7 June,  6-8pm: Talk by Mindy Seu & Gro Sarauw and Anni Garza Lau feat.                                              Ghost Agency

– Sunday 11 June, 3-5pm: ARI. Readings #Fear and Fauna II.

More information on the public program of ARI. Readings, talks and performances can be found here on the website under ARI. Index

With generous support from: Augustinus Fonden, Københavns Kommune; Rådet for Visuel Kultur and Danish Arts Foundation. 

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Opening hours:

Wednesday: 2-6pm
Thursday: 2-6pm
Sunday: 1-4pm

Plus by appointment: arielfeminisms@gmail.com

Location: Dag Hammarskjölds Allé 42D, 4th floor, 2100 København

______________________________________

Photos: Malle Madsen

Arts of Repair: Part 2 takes place at Center for Arts and Mental Health, and is a collaboration with Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, where we are co-hosting two workshops as part of their ongoing research project Arts of Repair.

Arts of Repair is a series of seminars about and with the patient perspective in meetings between art and medicine. The seminars thematize minorized people’s encounter with systemic oppression, pain- and trauma management, colonial violence and collective, self-organized reparative technologies.

The seminar series runs in two acts. First part was held on June 22 with a focus on reproductive justice. The second part will be held on October 27 and 28 and center collective organizing and strategizing around care work in a facilitated workshop by The Union - A Cultural Workers Union for BIPoCs and a translating workshop with Intercultural Women's Council.

With an emphasis on care work as a valued and vital component in long-term political organizing, The Union will host a conversation-based workshop on strategizing and sharing learnings amongst minorized people. The seminar will continue the following day with a participatory workshop where we will be translating texts from Danish and English into other languages. The texts are testimonials by the writing group HAWWA and are their personal experiences as minoritised women with the healthcare system.

PROGRAM
Workshop by The Union
October 27, 4-6.15PM

The Union will host a workshop about the importance of care work as an integral part of political organizing as a collective, focusing on workers rights and conditions for BIPOC artists and cultural workers.

Introduction to The Union.
Introductions will be made to the survey of systemic underrepresentation of BIPOC artists and cultural workers in creative industries in Denmark, made by The Union in 2020, the importance of care work and separatism, and thoughts on healing practices and invisible labour.

15 min break

Conversations in smaller groups
The workshop is an invitation to reflect on one's own experiences and positionality through conversations and sharings in smaller groups. Emphasis will be on sharing experiences and strategies for navigating different spaces, institutions, actors, power positions etc.

30 min - closing resting meditation with Sall Lam Toro
Sall Lam Toro will conduct a resting meditation that invites bodies to hold space for exhaustion under capitalism and oppressive structures. They use the erotic to activate strategies that already exist in our own bodies to confront and hold space for different parts of ourselves that live with exhaustion at various capacities. The meditation will last 20 min.

There will be snacks and homemade herbal tea and coffee.

The workshop will center BIPOCs and other people with the experience of being minorized, and the organizers will prioritize registrations accordingly.
The language will be in english.

Translating Workshop, with lunch
October 28 12-2.30PM

In this workshop, we will translate Danish and English texts about reproductive justice - the right to live a free and dignified life in physical, psychological, social and sexual health - to several languages. The texts are personal stories written from experiences with the health system. They are produced by the writing group HAWWA; Sebolelo K. L. Mohapeloa, Trine Mee Sook and Uzma Farooq, facilitated by Nazila Ghavami Kivi. The group was formed based on a workshop that unfolded around motherhood, and the experience of being treated differently by the health system.
The translations will happen individually or in small groups created from the languages that the participants can and want to translate into. The translated text will be published and distributed in health clinics, hospitals and treatment centers.

There will be served tea, coffee and a light lunch during the workshop.
The workshop is facilitated in collaboration with Intercultural Women’s Council.

Please sign up for one or both of the workshops by writing an email to: arielfeminisms@gmail.comWhen signing up for the workshop with The Union please state if you are BIPOC or have experience with being minoritized.

The series of seminars finalizes Arts of Repair, a residency project between the Laboratory of Aesthetics and Ecology and Center for Arts and Mental Health. The residency has had as its focal point the reinhabitation of healing spaces via careful curatorial practice. The project is part of the programme ART4MED, coordinated by Art2M / Makery (Fr) in collaboration with Bioart Society (Fi), Kersnikova (Si), Waag Society (Nl), and supported by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.The seminars are generously supported by Danish Arts Foundation

Practical info and accessibility:
Hans Bogbinders Allé 3, 2nd floor to the left, 2300 København S

The symposia can be accessed from the hospital's main entrance. Go to the 2nd floor and the hospital ward to the left. There is access for prams, wheelchairs, etc, via the elevator. Please call us at 60487910 if you need any assistance.

Safer Space Guidelines

Respect and support.
Respect everyone present in the shared space, their speeches, and their participation. Act with good intentions and take care of each other.

Assumption and generalization.
Let’s not make assumptions about people’s gender, pronouns, sexual orientation, health status, background, abilities etc. without them being told. Respect everyone’s right to self-determination and privacy.

Consent.
Don’t touch or take pictures of anyone without consent. Ask for consent and respect the answer received. In digital spaces, get consent before taking a screenshot or recordings of participants. Be willing to apologize, be open to critique, and change your behavior if someone asks.

Accountability.
Everyone present is involved in the realization of a safer space. If you witness or encounter discrimination or inappropriate behaviour, please inform this to the organizers. We welcome feedback before, during, and after the events. You can provide this to the organizers of the event or anonymously via the email: arielfeminisms@gmail.com

ABOUT

The Union - A Cultural Workers Union for BIPoCs
in Denmark was established in 2018 by a group of racialised artists and cultural workers, who saw the need to to organise to highlight and problematize the different forms of race-based discrimination and precarious working conditions in the arts-and cultural industries.

Sall Lam Toro
Sall (they/them/hir)) is a multimedia interdisciplinary performance artist and organizer. Their work focuses on sensuous, poetic, decolonial and queer activations, and ruptures in time and space. Themes such as grief, transformation and new reencounters with/of the senses informs their work heavily through the practices of Butoh dance theatre, afrofuturism, and abolitionism.

Nazila Ghavami Kivi / HAWWA
is a critic, teacher, translator and activist. Her expertise spands over critical feminist methologies, minority perspectives, and body politics. She writes about politics, gender, body and culture from a postcolonial, queer feminist perspective that challenge existing stories about marginalized people and positions. Within the project, Kivi has initiated the creative writing workshop HAWWA centering questions around reproductive justice and birthing experiences of minoritized women and lgbtq within the Danish health system.

Intercultural Women's Council
is an umbrella organization for a series of unions in Denmark and works for ethnic minorities conditions and equalities. IKR offers anonymous, free counseling and translation in a range of different international languages. Hereby the organization's volunteers offer support to minorized people's encounters with the public in social, economic, legal and health related contexts.

National Center for Art and Mental Health
has been founded through the growing consensus within the health system that medication alone can't always treat or cure mental illness. NCKMS is a Multi artistic and research based center located inside Psykiatisk Center Amager in the old Sct. Elisabeth stiftelse, and consists of an interdisciplinary team of artists, mental health staff, researchers from humanity and psychiatry and people with lived experiences within psychiatry. The organizational structure is horizontal and team based and it holds values such as sharing of knowledge and power as a supplement to society's principals around competition and optimization. All activities center around kindness, collaboration and mutual reflection.

Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology (LABAE)
is a curatorial platform for experimental, artistic work around shared exhaustion and collective healing in the intersection between ecology, the social and multispecies inequality and solidarity. LABAE brews new communities focusing on radical care and reparation practices.

‘We choose the birds' language’ by Eva Posas, is a performative reading event held at The Women’s Building.

‘We choose the birds' language’ is formed as a participatory reading, where Posas’ was guiding us to connect and explore the parameters of language through sound. Posas work explores the immateriality of language, identity and memory in relation to Zapotec culture, and this reading event is connected to her ongoing research project Phantom Languages. As part of ‘We choose the birds' language’ Posas has made a selection of literature that will enter into ARIEL ARCHIVE.

With this event we also mark our farewell to ARIEL’s exhibition platform and presence in the Women's Building but not to the project at large. We're thankful for all the wonderful memories we take with us –– all the exhibitions and readings that the artist bestowed upon us these last three years. We hope to see friends, colleagues, and newcomers at all the future projects to come.

We want to express our utmost gratitude to all artists, guest-curators and collaborators that we had the pleasure to work with through the first and second exhibition cycle at The Women's Building.

At the event it will be possible to buy publications from ARIEL PRESS, look through and lend books with you home for the summer from ARIEL ARCHIVE and sign-up to follow our reading group ARI. Readings, as well as our future exhibition and collaborative projects in Denmark and abroad.

LITERATURE

Discourse on the logic of language, Marlene NourbeSe Philip

The shitholes Syllabus; Undoing HisStory, Clelia O. Rodríguez

Blood, language and surname. Indigenous women and nation states, Yásnaya Elena A. Gil

The Storytellers Escape, Leslie Marmon Silko

tobi chupa chonna bilingue,  Eva Posas

Biography:

Eva Posas (1985, Mexico) is a curator. Working across curatorial and editorial boundaries, she is interested in the immateriality of language, Zapotec culture, identity and memory as a form of production.

In past projects her work investigated publishing as an articulation of social complexities, storytelling as a form of curating, the crossing between public and private spaces and the politics of subtleness as a subversive methodology through exhibitions, pedagogical programs, books and public art projects. From 2020 to 2021 she was curator- in-residence at Jan Van Eyck Academy. She was co-curator with Mônica Hoff of the theory, art and technology program Materia Abierta and works on a book about her research Phantom Languages.

ARIEL - Feminism in the Aesthetic is a nomadic platform for intersectional feminist practices, originally situated in the Women's Building. ARIEL is a mobile and digital archive, publishing house and exhibition project, committed to supporting existing and facilitating new structures for care and sustainable collaborative practices, expanding notions on equity and the eco-commons through feminist curatorial practice and research.

Directed by Karen Vestergaard Andersen and Nina Wöhlk, in collaboration with Helen Nishijo and Frederikke Granvig.

Photo: Malle Madsen

The project and exhibition is generously supported by:

Bikubenfonden
Statens Kunstfond
København Kommune, Rådet for Visuel Kunst
MARI KANTER arkitekter
Decor Farver
faustlight
Flügger farver
STARK
Kvindernes Bygning

Arts of Repair is a collaboration with Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, where we are organising and co-hosting workshops as part of their ongoing research project Arts of Repair.

Arts of Repair is a series of seminars about and with the patient perspective in encounters between art and medicine. The seminars thematize minoritized people’s encounter with the public health system, pain- and trauma management, colonial violence and collective, self-organized reparative technologies.

The seminar series will run in two acts. First part will be held on June 22 with a focus on reproductive justice. Writer and critic Nazila Ghavami Kivi will talk about her work on minoritized people’s encounter with the birthing system. Kivi will introduce the concept ‘ethnic pain’ - an alienation and othering of pain expressions that are not recognized, accepted and receiving adequate treatment within the Danish health system.

The day will offer readings by Sebolelo K. L. Mohapeloa, Trine Mee Sook and Uzma Farooq of texts created in the writing workshop HAWWA, facilitated by Kivi. This workshop has unfolded around motherhood, and the experience of being treated differently by the health system.

The day will also offer a listening session of soundworks by artist Edna Bonhomme. Bonhomme works with (in)fertility, reproductive justice with a focus on racial bias, and the high rates of complications and death amongst Black birthing women and newborns in the Global North.

There will be served snacks and homemade herbal tea.

The symposia finalizes Arts of Repair, a residency project between the Laboratory of Aesthetics and Ecology and Center for Arts and Mental Health. The residency has had as its focal point the reinhabitation of healing spaces via careful curatorial practice. The project is part of the programme ART4MED, coordinated by Art2M / Makery (Fr) in collaboration with Bioart Society (Fi), Kersnikova (Si), Waag Society (Nl), and supported by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.

The symposia is generously supported by Statens Kunstond

PROGRAM

10AM-14PM: Translator Workshop, with lunch (registration needed)

In this wokshop, we will translate Danish and English texts about reproductive justice - the right to live a free and dignified life in physical, psychological, social and sexual health - to several languages. The texts are personal stories written from experiences with the health system. They are produced in writing workshops for minoritized women and qtbpoc facilitated by Nazila Ghavami Kivi.

The translations will happen individually or in small groups created from the languages the participants can and want to translate into. The translated text will be printed and distributed in health clinics, hospitals and treatment centers. There will be served tea, coffee, snacks and a light lunch during the workshop.

Please sign up for participation in the workshop: arielfeminisms@gmail.com

The workshop is facilitated by Intercultual Women’s council and ARIEL - Feminisms in the Aesthetics.

Open program (no registration needed)

15.30-16.30 PM: Readings of workshop texts by the writing group with introduction by Nazila Kivi

16.30-17.30 PM: Conversation about Reproduktive Justice and Ethnic Pain between Nazila Kivi and Ida Bencke

17.30-18.00 PM: Listening session with piece by Edna Bonhomme treating colonial traumas and marginalized healing technologies.

Practical info and accessibility:
Hans Bogbinders Allé 3, 2nd floor to the left, 2300 København S

The symposia can be accessed from the hospital's main entrance. Go to the 2nd floor and the hospital ward to the left. There is access for prams, wheelchairs, etc, via the elevator.

ABOUT

Nazila Kivi
is a critic, teacher, translator and activist. Her expertise spands over critical feminist methologies, minority perspectives, and body politics. She writes about politics, gender, body and culture from a postcolonial, queer feminist perspective that challenge existing stories about marginalized people and positions. She has translated the books 'Kvinder uden mænd', 'Frie oplevelser' og 'Mænd fra forskellige civilisationer' by the Iranian born author Shahrnush Parsipur.Edna Bonhomme
is a historian of science, freelance writer, and interdisciplinary artist whose work interrogates racial inequalities in medicine and science. Her artistic work and writing critically engage with how humans approach science, epidemics, culture, race, and gender.

Interkulturelt Kvinderåd (Inter Cultural Women's Council)
is an umbrella organization for a series of unions in Denmark and works for ethnic minorities conditions and equalities. IKR offers anonymous, free counseling and translation in a range of different international languages. Hereby the organization's volunteers offer support and xxxxx to vulnerable people's encounters with the public in social, economic, legal and health related contexts.

ARIEL - Feminism in the Aesthetic
is a nomadic platform for intersectional feminist practices, originally situated in the Women's Building. ARIEL is a mobile and digital archive, publishing house and exhibition project, committed to supporting existing and facilitating new structures for care and sustainable collaborative practices, expanding notions on equity and the eco-commons through feminist curatorial practice and research. Directed and initiated by Karen Vestergaard Andersen and Nina Wöhlk, in collaboration with Helen Nishijo and Frederikke Granvi.

Nationalt Center for Kunst og Mental Sundhed (National Center for Art and Mental Health)
has been founded rough the growing consensus within the health system that medication alone can't always treat or cure mental illness. NCKMS is a Multi artistic and research based center located inside Psykiatisk Center Amager in the old Sct. Elisabeth stiftelse, and consists of an interdisciplinary team of artists, mental health staff, researchers from humanity and psychiatry and people with lived experiences within psychiatry. The organizational structure is horizontal and team based and it holds values such as sharing of knowledge and power as a supplement to society's principals around competition and optimization. All activities center around kindness, collaboration and mutual reflection.

Laboratoriet for Æstetik og Økologi (LABAE)
is a curatorial platform for experimental, artistic work around shared exhaustion and collective healing in the intersection between ecology, the social and multispecies inequality and solidarity. LABAE brews new communities focusing on radical care and reparation practises.

Photos in courtesy of The Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology

With the exhibition Hamra, Monia Ben Hamouda creates an intricate sculptural installation for ARIEL, where a series of laser-cut metal structures, coated with vibrantly red-coloured spices, appears as floating calligraphy. Through Arabic religious and cultural practices, Ben Hamouda's works explore topics such as sociocultural identity, rituals, "fatigue", trauma, anger, and politics.

The sculptural work is a continuation of Ben Hamouda’s ongoing series Aniconism as Figurative Urgency. As the title suggests, the works explore aniconism, which in Islamic visual culture translates into the rejection of figurative representations of living beings or divine presence in favour of geometric shapes and calligraphy. The sculptures stand out in the air as calligraphic brushstrokes reminiscent of Islamic / Arabic characters, and yet they remain unreadable, while even assuming pseudo-animal-like touches. Figuration is present, yet absent in the installation. The sculptural form was made from a destroyed sketch of the drawing of a cow. All lines that once formed the body of an animal are now completely different – almost reaching abstraction.

The title Hamra, meaning red in Arabic, connects to an investigation of inflicted trauma and means of ushering in healing and empathy. The surface of the four-part metal structure, the walls and floor are alternately coated with powdered spices; chilli pepper and paprika, tracing the imagery of the sculpture while also creating a strong sense of each layer being inextricably linked together with the next. All elements are part of the same piece, part of the same sculpture, they are interconnected and rely on one another. Through weaving the lexicon of family traumas – those that in a heterocolonial patriarchy are passed down unequally, and have to do with geography, geopolitics, language and vocabulary, misapprehensions and violence – Ben Hamouda is interested in how art holds and retains certain energy, how figuration and abstraction reverberate against one another to create emotional static.

In the most physical sense Ben Hamouda connects the piece with the colour red. The medicinal, ceremonial, culinary, and ritualistic properties of the applied spices have been used for protection for thousands of years. Above all the piece connects to the energy related to red; our roots, the material needs, our security, as with the place where you eat, work and live from. However, in Hamra it is also the colour of flags, cultures, wars, pride, power, anger, and sudden strength. And curses.

In the belief that humans are inextricably linked to their genetic family tree and the psycho-mental universe of their ancestors, Ben Hamouda reflects on her own roots. It concerns the trauma of language, and the trauma of migration processes. Of leaving family behind, and forgetting mother tongues. With Hamra, Ben Hamouda shows us how deeply we are all marked by and influenced by the heritage of our ancestors. In the encounter between contrasting elements, she reveals the peculiar persistence and complex symbolism of human emotions.

Biography:

Monia Ben Hamouda was born in 1991 in Milan to an Italian mother and a Tunesian father. She lives and works between al-Qayrawan and Milan, where she earned her BA in Visual Arts - Sculpture - from Brera Academy of Fine Arts. Her practice centres around exploring the human condition and cultural heritage, especially its oppressing and traumatic characters.

Solo exhibitions include: Two suns upon Shatt al Jarid, Pols space, Valencia (2021); Love Data, Alios 16ème Biennale d’Art Contemporain, Théâtre Cravey Pavilion, La Teste-de-Bûch (2019); Extended protection, Alle[1]goric Defence, Gallery CC, Malmö (2019); Miranda, pane project, Milan (2017). In 2020 she received a Special Mention for the Ducato Prize.

Images: Malle Madsen

Images: Detail from Aniconism as Figurative Urgency (Hamra), 2022. Courtesy Monia Ben Hamouda, ChertLüdde

Image: Detail from Aniconism as Figurative Urgency (Hamra), 2022. Courtesy Monia Ben Hamouda

In her solo exhibition Ariel is searching for her habits everywhere, visual artist and poet Melanie Kitti presents new works consisting of a series of upholstered eye-shaped paintings, as well as a text written specifically for the exhibition, and freely distributed in a poster format. With this exhibition, Kitti works extensively with themes that occupy her practice between image and text. It is characteristic that Kitti on the one hand relates concretely to painting as an object. The formalist qualities of painting and the overall art historical narrative in which the medium is included are examined and explored through varying materialities in order to once again question the divide between art(s) and craft. At the same time, Kitti, on the other hand, intuitively relates to a world of motifs that based on her Nordic childhood memories, connects and invents new narratives that are retold in small pictorial fragments.

The paintings in Ariel are searching for her habits everywhere address the public as pairs of eye-shaped padded objects. Kitti uses skins in scaled shades between white, brown and black on which abstract color surfaces meet motifs of snail pairs, oysters, body limbs and natural fauna, which are fluidly connected. The leather surfaces of the paintings are upholstered as if they were a kind of outrageous interior furniture, but still, by virtue of their motif world, point outwards to the marvelous life of our planet, and our human dealings with and connection to all organic and inorganic matter. Kitti’s depictions blurs the boundaries between inside and out, and use the natural world to expand our understanding of what constitutes the domestic. The exhibition brings together themes that embrace our longings and problematic behavior as human beings, such as our conflict-filled and divergent feelings of and around belonging, an in- herent interdependence and the intimacy and border zones that are constituted on a social, somatic and biologically constructed level. In a horizontal line the upholstered paintings hang in an organically formed scenography connecting the eyeshaped paintings and their various motifs - with the viewer’s gaze - where Kitti connects motif and narrative. A central part of the work includes a text by Kitti, written specifically for the exhibition. An excerpt from the text reads;

“Ariel is searching for her habits everywhere
in her closet
in her vomit
in a wind
in an edge
in a corner
in distend
in every other limb
she makes commas in every other glim
…
Ariel keeps searching”.

The audience can take the poem with them as it is part of the exhibition handout, as a little, quivering, ironic reminder, inside of pockets, about our perhaps impossible longing to find a common code; a home in each other; and a kinship in our lives and habits. The text, together with the paintings make for a tumultuous  framing of inner and outer nature. The series of eye-shaped paintings inevitably stare back at the audience. They are searching, pervasive, and delimiting, as the title suggests; Ariel is searching for her habits everywhere.


Biography:
Melanie Kitti (SE) is a visual artist, poet and activist. She holds a degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo and The Schools of Visual Arts, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and The Danish Academy of Creative Writing in Copenhagen. In 2016, she started the artist-run exhibition space Destiny´s in Oslo, which she continues to run in collaboration with three other artists. In 2021, she initiated the magazine Abhivyakti together with Priya Bains. She will make her debut with the collection of poems Halvt urne, halvt gral in 2022.

Images: Details from work and poem; Ariel is searching for her habits everywhere, Melanie Kitti, 2022.

Photo: Malle Madsen

The project and exhibition is generously supported by:

Bikubenfonden
Statens Kunstfond
København Kommune, Rådet for Visuel Kunst
MARI KANTER arkitekter
Decor Farver
faustlight
Flügger farver
STARK
Kvindernes Bygning

For Alberta and Victor, a collection of conjurings and opacities, is an exhibition by St. Croix-based artist La Vaughn Belle, guest curated by Daniela Agostinho.

The exhibition presents a new body of work, comprising a video essay and a large-scale collage from a  broader series entitled “How to Imagine the Tropicalia as Monumental” (2021). The exhibition engages with the narrative of Alberta Viola Roberts and Victor Cornelius, who were taken as children from the Danish West Indies to be displayed in the 1905 colonial exhibition at Tivoli Gardens, organized by Emma Gad, co-founder of the Women’s Building.

With this intervention in ARIEL’s space, Belle explores how unremembered histories can be inscribed in bodies, paper, landscapes, seascapes, and the built environment. Working with the gaps in knowledge about the lives of the two children before they were taken to Denmark, the video work "In the place of shadows" (2021) employs critical fabulation to wonder about Alberta and Victor’s childhood memories on the Danish West Indies. Shot in St. Croix, the work explores traces of history lodged in the landscape to surface the continual haunting of past presences on the island. Turning away from the violence of archival records, the video is conceived as an offering to Alberta and Victor, an attempt to create a space of care and regard for the memories of their early life.

Covering part of the exhibition space, Belle’s collage work explores the gesture of assembling and reconfiguring material fragments of history to imagine new conceptions of time, space and self. Originating in a set of paper previously damaged by a storm, the piece explores and resignifies the memory of devastation lodged in the material to “transgress temporal limitations, cross infinite distances, and invent multiple horizons”. In layering multiple elements pulled from the artist’s vocabulary, the piece speaks to how the colonial past and present are not separate but juxtaposed, entangled and fluid.

Together, this new body of work extends Belle’s counter-archival practice to explore how to summon a different kind of knowledge from fragments and traces of history. The exhibition offers a room for spatial and temporal collapse— what the artist terms a space of “pastpresentfuture”—, where different spaces and times touch, muddle and speak to one another, surfacing unremembered histories and their unresolved unfolding.

UPCOMING

ARI. Readings 12# For Alberta and Victor, a collection of conjurings and opacities.

Wednesday  December 1st. from 6-8pm (CET). ZOOM.Free admission.

Sign-up: arielfeminisms@gmail.com

https://arielfeminisms.dk/ari#ari-readings-12-for-alberta-and-victor-a-collection-of-conjurings-and-opacities

The exhibition is realised with the generous support of the Danish Arts Foundation and the Copenhagen Council for Visual Arts.

BIOGRAPHIES

La Vaughn Belle makes visible the unremembered. She is a visual artist working in a variety of disciplines that include: video, performance, painting, installation and public art. She explores the material culture of coloniality and her art presents countervisualities and narratives that challenge colonial hierarchies and invisibility. She has exhibited in the Caribbean, the USA and Europe. Her work has been featured in a wide range of media including: the NY Times, Politiken, VICE, The Guardian, Caribbean Beat, the BBC and Le Monde. She holds an MFA from the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, Cuba, an MA and a BA from Columbia University in NY. Her studio is based in the Virgin Islands.

Daniela Agostinho is a cultural theorist and curator. Her research and curatorial practice focus on visual legacies of colonialism, the aesthetics of late modern conflict, and with how art and visual culture mediate relationships to power. Her research and curatorial project Archival Encounters is concerned with how artistic practices engage with the visual debris of Danish colonial archives. She is co-editor of the books Uncertain Archives: Critical Keywords for Big Data (MIT Press, 2021), (W)archives: Archival Imaginaries, War and Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press, 2020), and The Uncertain Image (Routledge, 2019). She is Assistant professor in the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University.

Photos: Malle Madsen

Las two images courtesy La Vaughn Belle

1) Detail shot of "How to Imagine the Tropicalia as Monumental", 2021

2) Still from video; “In the place of shadows”, 2021

Exhibition is open by appointment: arielfeminisms@gmail.com

The project and exhibition is generously supported by:

Bikubenfonden
Statens Kunstfond
København Kommune, Rådet for Visuel Kunst
Hübsch Danish Interior and Design
Tæppeland
MARI KANTER arkitekter
Decor Farver
faustlight
Flügger farver
STARK
Kvindernes Bygning

A Webshop through the Ages is an installation by visual artist, Hannah Heilmann. From a user perspective Heilmann is sharing a narrative of manic buying behavior and the dystopia of pleasure-based consumption.

A rudimentary and automated payment system minds its own business, while some rustic wooden doors display both a reeling revolving door-effect and an unbound swaying storage space. However, the exhibition also shows glimpses of a narrative inhabited by lone femme-knight figures, and shopping stick folks, as well as haunting costumes, putting together phenomena of compound time, arbitrarily jumping between acts through different textures and stagings. As a historian-dreamer of costume, Heilmann accesses repressed memories of costume-as-technology, while a ferocious production apparatus and a non-coherent economic system constantly lurk in the background of the conversation.

A Webshop through the Ages is linked to Heilmann's research project, “Pre-reform Webshop” on shopaholism, sustainability ideas, consumption pains, and a particular worshipping of the past that, like a double-edged sword, expresses both escapism and futurism.

A research project where Heilmann sets out to examine the social choreographies that apply to the webshop's shopping cart, its accelerated context constructions, and oblivions. To search for possible spaces of agency in the whiteness of interface.

The installation at ARIEL is a fabulating, physical delusion of the pre-reformed webshop. Where the libidinal economy, the secret texture of values, lifestyles, and desires offers itself as another form of texture through Heilmann's imagery, asking what parts of the present we want to replicate and carry on with, and what futures we long for.

With the seamy side out, A Webshop through the Ages threads up chronologies and binaries by opening up the engine rooms of human desires. The big twists and turns in the small, and vice versa. The contactless trade (and being) is given gears, contour, and time, when pasttense fictions and not yet produced futures are put to work, marching to the drum of the rolling sales slips.

Hannah Heilmann is a visual artist based in Copenhagen. Heilmann holds a MA in Art history, University of Copenhagen, 2010. Associate Professor at the Royal Danish Art Academy, Copenhagen.

The webshop www.prereform.shop launches October 2021.

The exhibition is realized with support from Kulturministeriets Pulje til Kunstnerisk Udviklingsvirksomhed.

Photos by Malle Madsen

The project and exhibition is generously supported by:

Bikubenfonden
Statens Kunstfond
København Kommune, Rådet for Visuel Kunst
MARI KANTER arkitekter
Decor Farver
faustlight
Flügger farver
STARK
Kvindernes Bygning

Mobile Fragments is an exhibition with works by the two artists and researchers, Edna Bonhomme and Luiza Prado de O. Martins, made in continuation of their residency hosted by ARIEL in Copenhagen.

The residency is a collaboration with Ida Bencke from The Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology and takes place at ARIEL in June. It is the commencing part of Bencke’s exhibition and research project, which will look into questions of disability- and reproductive justice, and explore matters of racialized and gendered inequities within health care systems. The project is a part of ART4MED, coordinated by Art2M / Makery (FR) in cooperation with Bioart Society (FI), Kersnikova (SI), Waag Society (Nl), and co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.

In diverging as well as intersecting patterns, Edna Bonhomme and Luiza Prado de O. Martins share an interest in the act of mapping out actual and metaphorical landscapes. Whereas Bonhomme looks at the medical landscape in all its unfolding into psychiatry, health services, e.g., Prado de O. Martins engages with urban flora and soil, as a way to understand not only herbal landscapes, but also to reflect upon human life, myths, misunderstandings, pure-blood and the right to live.

In the exhibition Mobile Fragments, Bonhomme activates the intimate, communal, and scientific (mis)conceptions of the black body by triangulating medical narratives of failure, loss, and growth. Starting from autobiography and moving towards near present accounts, the work is presented in the form of a mixed-media and multi-sensory experiment. In collages and one sound piece, Bonhomme follows the line of an ongoing meditation that charts an archaeology of black (in)fertility while also troubling how we think about kin through journals, medical reports, psychoanalysis, and sound.

For her performance, Prado de O. Martins has developed work about the presence of a common contraceptive and edible plant, popularly known as Queen Anne’s Lace in Copenhagen. Her work examines themes concerning the dissemination of herbalist knowledge(s), fertility, and coloniality, looking into Denmark’s usage of jus sanguinis – a legal principle by which citizenship is determined by the nationality of one’s parents, rather than place of birth.

For their joint residency, Bonhomme and Prado O. Martins commenced collaborative research and worked on interrogating the role of scientific knowledge and how we look at bodies and healing. Both Prado de O. Martins and Bonhomme look at epistemologies of science and knowledge production and how they meet and diverge.

Biographies:

Luiza Prado de O. Martin is an artist, writer, and researcher based in Berlin, Germany whose work examines themes around fertility, reproduction, coloniality, gender, and race. She holds an MA from the Hochschule für Künste Bremen, and a PhD from the Berlin University of the Arts. Her ongoing artistic research project, “A Topography of Excesses”, looks into encounters between human and plant beings within the context of herbalist reproductive medicine, approaching these practices as expressions of radical care. Since 2019, she has broadened the scope of this research, developing a body of work that offers a critique of the racist concept of ‘overpopulation’ in the context of the current climate crisis. She is part of the curatorial board of Transmediale 2021 and an Assistant Professor and Vice-Director of the Centre for Other Worlds at the Lusófona University in Lisbon. She is also a founding member of Decolonising Design.

Edna Bonhomme is a historian of science, art worker, lecturer, and writer. She earned her PhD in the history of science from Princeton University and a Master of Public Health from Columbia University. Working with sound, text, and archives, Edna explores contagion, epidemics, and toxicity through decolonial practices and African diaspora worldmaking. A central question of her work asks: What makes people sick?  Her practices trouble how people perceive modern plagues, and how they try to escape from them while also attending to the modalities of care that shape the possibility for repair. Her project "Cartographies of Care" is part of her long-term research-project based on interviews and media representation of African diasporic health and healing in Germany. Some of her critical multimedia projects have been featured at Haus Kulturen der Welt, alpha nova galerie futura, and the Austrian Academy of Women Artists, Galerie im Turm, Kunstverein Hildesheim, and Digital Prater Gallery. She has written for Aljazeera, The Atlantic, The Baffler, The Guardian, The Nation, Africa is a Country, The New Republic, ISIS History of Science Journal, Journal for North African Studies, Public Books, and other publications. She lives in Berlin, Germany.

The project and exhibition is generously supported by:

Bikubenfonden
Statens Kunstfond
København Kommune, Rådet for Visuel Kunst
MARI KANTER arkitekter
Decor Farver
faustlight
Flügger farver
STARK
Kvindernes Bygning

Photos: Malle Madsen

From 21 May to 6 June, visual artists Yvette Brackman and Bettina Camilla Vestergaard will create a space with their exhibition project Art Differences Communities where it is possible to share and produce knowledge and a new set of language in order to strengthen mutual respect within the structures and work ethics of the precarious art world. Selected elements from the artist’s upcoming book that deals with harrasment and discrimination across the Danish art scene, are displayed and presented in ARIEL’s exhibition space, and will later be published on ARIEL PRESS and able to purchase in Autumn 2021.

In continuation of their working process with the book, Brackman and Vestergaard install a long table in ARIEL's exhibition space on top of which archive and collection boxes are placed – as a tribute to the American, feminist visual artist, Mary Beth Edelson and her work Story Gathering Boxes. The audience is invited to enter a dialogue based on the questions and reflections that the artists want to raise with the book, by sharing their thoughts, experiences, and knowledge in the field. During the exhibition period, we invite you to participate in a public program with talks, workshops, as well as reading and conversation groups concerning the exhibition’s themes.

As an ongoing ’work-archive’ and temporary meeting place, Art Differences Communities will provide a space to reflect on and discuss tools and knowledge resources in terms of developing the book and responding to the artists' possible blind spots. Art Differences Communities invite guests into the process of preparing a handbook with the intention to contribute to strengthening the professional environment of art in the long run.

Biographies:

Yvette Brackman makes sculpture, performance and text to create works of art that examine the body's relationship to space and memory. Brackman is represented in several public collections, including the Danish National Gallery and was professor and head of the Department of Wall and Space at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.

Bettina Camilla Vestergaard works with photography in the expanded field including text, sound and performance. Her works of art focus on specific places, memory and representation and bring together different voices and image regimes in visual, spatial and written narratives. Vestergaard has exhibited and published in Denmark and abroad, is represented in the collection of the Danish Arts Foundation and has been a member of the board - Copenhagen Visual Arts Committee.

PUBLIC PROGRAM

As part of Art Differences Communities’ scheduled, public program, we invite guests into the process of developing a handbook with the intention of strengthening the professional environment of art in the long run.

During the exhibition period, Brackman and Vestergaard are present for a number of open discussion groups in which the audience is invited to enter a dialogue and respond to the artists’ ongoing work with the handbook's question guide and other related documents.

For further response, please write to: kunsthaandbog@gmail.com

As part of the public program, the exhibition can be accessed every Wednesday. In addition, Art Differences Communities encourage interested groups to use the exhibition space to facilitate group discussions that can reflect on the exhibition's themes. If you wish to make use of the space for this purpose, these activities are free and can be carried out independently by a forehand agreement with ARIEL.

Participation in all program events can be done by registering at: arielfeminisms@gmail.com

Thursday 20 May: “Kunst og Solidaritet“ Talk Town, Union 1.30 –2.30pm

For this year's TALK TOWN, ARIEL presents the event “Art and Solidarity”, where the artists, Yvette Brackman and Bettina Camilla Vestergaard will open a conversation about equity and solidarity in the Danish art environment. In interaction with two invited guests, Visual Artist Michelle Eistrup and Art Historian, Rune Finseth, they will reflect on possible structural changes that deals with both direct and indirect discrimination.

The conversation can subsequently be listened to in the exhibition as a 1-hour edited audio recording, produced by The Lake Radio.

· Tuesday 25 May: Exhibition is open to the public from 3pm - 6pm

· Wednesday 26 May: Discussion group with the artists from 10am - 12pm

· Thursday 27 May: Discussion group with the artists from 7pm - 9pm

· Tuesday 1 June: Exhibition is open to the public from 3pm - 6pm

· Wednesday 2 June:  Discussion group with the artists from 10am - 12pm

· Thursday 3 June: Discussion group with the artists from 7 - 9pm

· Saturday 5 June: Discussion group with the artists from 2 - 4pm

· Sunday 6 June: ARI. Readings event from 2 - 4pm. See description on the back cover.

ARI. Readings 9# Arts Differences Communities

In relation to the exhibition's public program, Yvette Brackman, Bettina Camilla Vestergaard and the curators at ARIEL will host an ARI. Readings event based on the literary material, which has helped shape the ongoing process of the book. The purpose of the reading event is to expand the knowledge of usage of language and push for development when it comes to how we speak about discrimination and the harrassment by sharing resources, and as a result iniatiate a conversation on how we collectively can create a more caring and respectful artistic milieu.

Sunday 6 June 2-4pm. The Women’s Building. Free admission. Sign-up: arielfeminisms@gmail.com

Photos: Malle Madsen

Kunst Forskelle Fællesskaber accreditation:

Graphic design: Nilas Andersen

Research Assistant: Frederikke Møller Helvad

The project and exhibition is generously supported by:

Bikubenfonden
Statens Kunstfond
København Kommune, Rådet for Visuel Kunst
Billedkunstnernes Forbund
MARI KANTER arkitekter
Decor Farver
faustlight
Flügger farver
STARK
Kvindernes Bygning

ARIEL is pleased to present the exhibition, Songs From The Compost, an exhibition which incorporates a sound-piece installation and a performance by Amsterdam-based Lithuanian artist Eglė Budvytytė.

The exhibition Songs From The Compost by Eglė Budvytytė comprises an installation of the sound-piece Songs From The Compost: Mutating Bodies, Imploding Stars and a closing performance of Some Were Carried, Some – Dragged Behind, marking the end of the exhibition.

Within a softly lit space, small sand dunes are gathered in the corners of a soft carpet inviting listeners to sit down and lean back into the otherworldly soundscape of the piece Songs From The Compost: Mutating Bodies, Imploding Stars, composed by Eglė Budvytytė. The soundtrack channels the desires of a narrator shapeshifting between different expressions of gender, voices and voice registers, and beyond-human embodiments. The soft haunting lyrics of the songs draw on the ideas of the biologist, Lynn Margulis, celebrating the role of bacteria in making life possible, and animates the collaboration between the single-celled organisms. In Songs From The Compost: Mutating Bodies, Imploding Stars, the tropes of symbiosis, mutation, and hybridity is given a sonic reconstruction that reaches out and utilises the intimate nature of the medium to connect to its audience. To challenge sociobiological causes of hierarchical violence, Budvytytė combines the biological science of the Earth’s most basic lifeforms with concepts from the authorship of science-fiction writer, Octavia Butler. In this norm-critical environment, a conscious lullaby for adults is formulated, Budvytytė’s tone of voice offers the utmost uncanny sort of cautiously monitored comfort. The mode and intensity shifts, inducing waves of drowsiness and alertness that runs down through the spine and into the body. As if to say, you were already here, in this world of unicellular organisms, trotting through these multilayers of socio-political meanings – welcome to Songs from the Compost. Relax, all is repetitive, all is soil, all is recycled.

The second part of Songs From The Compost takes place in the Spring, when Budvytytė presents her performance Some Were Carried, Some – Dragged Behind on May 8th. In public space where we are still trying to understand and give notice to the many ways that the pandemic situation stopped and altered our ways of being connected, the performance Some Were Carried, Some – Dragged Behind speaks to how we carry, uplift and support each other in a nurturing way, even if we feel alienated by the World and one another.  Slowly and gently, small clusters of performers will be dragging and carrying each other through the squares and neighbouring streets of ARIEL. Resembling and drawing on the act of dragging bodies in public, that is mostly enacted by the authorities on disobedient bodies, the performance seeks to subvert these connotations through a shift of motion and speed into a caring and trustful surrender of bodies into hands of tenderness.

The exhibition Songs From The Compost collects sonic experimental as well as performative elements from Budvytytė's practice. Together, both Songs From The Compost: Mutating Bodies, Imploding Stars and Some Were Carried, Some - Dragged Behind articulate different ways in which we relate to each other and how this relationship affects our treatment of and shared responsibility for the Planet. Perceptibly, both works evoke a link to the Earth and all its creatures, where Budvytytė, in a present and alluring manner accentuates, how social hierarchies can be overthrown, and radically change existing societal systems.

UPDATE: The performance "Some Were Carried, Some – Dragged Behind" by Eglė Budvytytė will start at 12.00 -13.00 at the location of Frue Plads, 1168, København K. For further information on map and guiding please check our facebook and instagram.

Every Wednesday 3-6pm – and by special request – we are opening up the exhibition to private viewings in a period lasting until Sunday 9th of May. Send us an email to arielfeminisms@gmail.com and book an appointment to experience Eglė Budvytytės exhibition Songs From The Compost.

The exhibition is realised with the kind support of the Danish Arts Foundation and in collaboration with the Lithuanian cultural attaché in Sweden, Denmark and Finland, with the support from the Lithuanian Cultural Institute.

Biography: Eglė Budvytytė born in 1982, Lithuania, is an artist based in Amsterdam, working in the intersection between visual and performing arts. In her vocal and choreographic performances, she draws out relationships between bodies and their environments by either exploring codified behaviors in public spaces or the boundaries between the human and non-human. Her work was shown amongst others at Liste, Art Basel; 19th Biennale of Sydney; De Appel Arts Centre; CAC in Vilnius, and Stedeljik Museum in Amsterdam.

"Some Were Carried, Some – Dragged Behind" was performed by: Sanna Blennow, Aline Combe, Marina Dubia, Lucie Piot, Alice Presencer, Adrian Skjoldborg and Anabela Veloso.

Title: Amelia Groom. Lyrics, melodies, voices: Egle Budvytyte. Sound design: Steve Martin Snider

Images: Malle Madsen

Courtesy: ARIEL

From Saturday 20th of March – Sunday 9th of May the exhibition will be publicly accessible from the street level at ARIEL in the Women's Building. Through the exhibition period, the installation will be made accessible to the public by appointment only:

Every Wednesday 3-6pm – and by special request – we are opening up the exhibition to private viewings in a period lasting until Sunday 9th of May.

Send us an email to arielfeminisms@gmail.com and book an appointment to experience Eglė Budvytytės exhibition Songs From The Compost.

ARIEL will be monitoring the viewing with careful consideration to both the current and changing official guidelines for Covid-related regulations.

The project and exhibition is generously supported by:
Bikubenfonden
Statens Kunstfond
København Kommune, Rådet for Visuel Kunst
Lithuanian Cultural Institute
Tæppeland
MARI KANTER arkitekter
Decor Farver
faustlight
Flügger farver
STARK
Kvindernes Bygning

ARIEL is pleased to present the exhibition, Buenos días mujeres by Taipei-based artist Val Lee, and guest curated by Vernacular Institute, lead by Jo Ying Peng.

The exhibition Buenos días mujeres will be extended until and including 7 March 2021.

Text by Jo Ying Peng, Vernacular Institute:

00’00”

This is a curator’s note. Or to say, a project diary. Perhaps, it is more likely a clapperboard slate of the making of Buenos días mujeres. It starts from a conversation behind the scene and ends on the shooting day.

The Take 13

“Female, age 16 or older, no experience required.” Gina Arizpe(1) showed us those recruitment ads she collected from the streets randomly. She tried to approach the hirers for the interviews. It normally takes place in a kind of small room in buildings that holds no resemblance to any offices. It is understood as a method of field research. It is translated as a provoking act.

In a different scenario, when those missing person ads, in search of the disappeared in Juárez( 2) somehow bear resemblance to the one above. “If I don’t come back tomorrow, please call the police”, Gina said by the end of our meeting that afternoon.

01’47”

“The history of violence culminates in this merging of victim and perpetrator, of master and slave, of freedom and violence.”(3) Running, pushing, anchoring. Territorial power is portrayed by a group of wifebeaters. The initial concept of the storyboard focused on the contrast of collective against individual and majority crushes minority. Through the gaze of the photographer, masculinity shaped the abstract, unbreathable oppression while the nature of the weak formed the universality. It opens up the questions: How does the collective consciousness get internalized and lead to absorbing violence? In what way does society normalize barbarism? And how does the host of violent parasitism rebirth and return repeatedly?

5 October

From 7 am to 7 pm. As the scene shifts in places in Escandón, Mexico City - an abandoned school, an empty property and the house of Vernacular Institute, the action scripts activate the leading characters on the set. Uncertainty is employed through the scenarios. However, resistance dominated the narrative.

08’11”

The End.

But what in the world is still sponsoring violence?

1.Gina Arizpe (b.1972) is an artist who lives and works in Mexico City.

2. Ciudad Juárez is a Mexican city located on the border between Mexico and the United States. It is notorious for  “the capital of murdered women.”

3. Byung-Chul Han, Topology of Violence, The MIT Press

The exhibition Buenos días mujeres is based on the artist Val Lee's video work of the same title, which was researched and produced in 2019 in collaboration with Vernacular Institute in Mexico.

Two strangers, M and A, encounter each other in different sites around Escandón in Mexico City following ‘action scripts’ that designate their journey and reflect on the issue of femicide. Between auto-cinema and auto-documentary, Buenos días mujeres is designed beforehand, but played out in the absence of the director. Confronted with several scenarios and sets, the main characters in the film interpret the narrative as if on auto-pilot, while the photographers document their actions, freezing the specific time, and charting a path for future viewers.

Buenos días mujeres deals thematically with the killing of women, and gives the audience insight into an inner world situation governed by a pulsating toxic masculine behavior. In this way, a hypnotic and disturbing story is intertwined, which highlights the duality of the subject through a gender relationship that in a negative sense affects everyone, for example both women and men.

Buenos días mujeres is the seventh exhibition in ARIELs exhibition program, and is developed in collaboration with guest curator Jo Ying Peng, leader of Vernacular Institute. The groundbreaking work will be shown for the first time in a Danish context in a total installation consisting of video, found objects and audio elements made especially for Ariel's exhibition platform.

Biografies:

Val Lee is based in Taipei, Taiwan, and has exhibited at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (2020); Reconstres Internationale Paris/Berlin (2019/2020); Vernacular Institute Mexico (2019)); Hong-gah Museum; Taipei Fine Art Museum. Awards include the Asian Cultural Council New York Fellowship (2019); Taipei Fine Art Award(selected); Taishin Art Award (2017)

– Ghost Mountain Ghost Shovel Art Collective (2009-Now) which is led by director Val Lee, creates live-works that build constructed ephemeral situations, where the audience enters a poetic constellation of ‘action script’, installation, sound, hypnotic rhetoric, composite structure, mise-enscène, and space. Their works currently focus on urban violence, political turmoil, body memories of the unusual state, abstruse historical reenactment, and the diversified modes of psychological absorption and participation for public audiences.

Vernàcular Institute now situated in Mexico City, following on from Publish and be Damned, a peripatetic project focused on art publication and an independent art book fair since 2004. Vernacular Institute was founded in 2014 by Kit Hamonds, and is now run by Jo Ying Peng. Staging projects with a performative approach and in playful settings, the Vernacular Institute engages with the Curatorial and the Editorial through alternative forms of open discourse.

– Jo Ying Peng (b.1982, Taiwan) runs Vernacular Institute. Working across curatorial and editorial boundaries, her practice addresses the agency of art by approaching the social responses with political and poetic rhetorics. As former curator in Taipei Contemporary Art Center(TCAC), Peng has led projects that discuss post art history and institutional critique.

Buenos días mujeres, 2019: Production Vernacular Institute; Director Val Lee; Photography Yollotl Alvarado; Project Manager Elizabeth Calzado; Sound Erick Ruíz; Camera Assistant Hugo Sandoval; Characters Mónica Nepote and Alberto Perera.

Photos: Malle Madsen.

Image stills from the video work Buenos días mujeres, courtesy of Val Lee.

The exhibition Io Lib. by Marie Kølbæk Iversen presents printed matter, astrophysical simulations and choral singing stemming from her extensive and long-term investigation of the lunar entity Io through the Io/I-project (2015-). The project expands on the mythological cow-woman Io, who has been locked in orbit around her rapist Jupiter ever since the German astronomer Simon Marius named Jupiter’s innermost moon after her in 1614.

Through her name’s relation to binary code—zeros and ones, O-I, IO, Io—and with modern astrophysics as doula and intermediate, Kølbæk Iversen facilitates lunar Io’s escape from the gravitational pull of Jupiter by way of collectivity: hit by an asteroid cluster, the moon dissolves and is simultaneously released from her orbit. The simulation is based on Kepler’s laws and produced in collaboration with astrophysicist Ole Busborg Jensen.

In addition to the astrophysical computer simulations presented in the space, Io Lib. features Gravitational Shift—a participatory choral work and performance piece reflecting on the transformative and liberating potentialities of collectivity in the face of trauma. Gravitational Shift is an ongoing choral project composed by electroacoustic composer and classical singer Katinka Fogh Vindelev in collaboration with Marie Kølbæk Iversen.

The performance of Gravitational Shift on Sunday November 29th marks the ending of the Io Lib. exhibition period at ARIEL. All further information on how to participate in the preceding workshops and attend the performance is found here on the website under ARI. INDEX––Gravitational Shift.

With the onset of Autumn in the Northern hemisphere, the days grow shorter and darkness expands. This transitional period is reflected in Io Lib. through the equal malleability of the exhibition, which will change throughout the exhibition period with elements from the connected workshops, readings, and more, that find their way into the space.

Within the dimly-lit exhibition space behind the translucent mirror foil on the windows’ surfaces, and between the grey-green layered paint on the walls, the simulation of Io’s escape hangs floating on a screen. Combined with the liberatory singing of ‘Gravitational Shift’, the exhibition body of ‘Io Lib.’ changes in and from its nocturnal and diurnal stages and with the seasonal transition from autumn to winter.

The exhibition is realised with the kind support of the Danish Arts Foundation and in extension of Kølbæk Iversen’s 2020 digital commission for Kvadrat n_body crash.

Biography: Marie Kølbæk Iversen (1981) lives and works between Copenhagen, Denmark, and Oslo, Norway. In her work, Kølbæk Iversen explores concepts of perception and representation through media processes, using both graphics, film, performance, and sound and video technology. Her current research fellowship at the Norwegian National Academy of the Arts and Aarhus University is collectively funded by the Novo Nordisk Mads Øvlisen Scholarships and the Norwegian Artistic Research Program.

Photos: Malle Madsen

Last image: Still from Liber (2020). An astrophysical simulation of lunar Io’s liberation from the gravitational field of Jupiter by the aid of a passing asteroid cluster.

ARIEL presents Will you feel comfortable in my corner?; an exhibition incorporating a performance by Paris-based writer and performance artist Ndayé Kouagou.

Using text as a starting point, Kouagou works within a range of media like performance, sound and installation questioning the basic parameters that are constructing our socio-political standpoints. The exhibition reflects Kouagou’s explorations and approaches to the subject of otherness. By looking into how we share vulnerability and fortitude, Kouagou deals with the concepts of freedom, legitimacy and privilege as defining conditions for what is viewed as other.

“What makes someone open or closed? People don't have a lid or a bottle cap, so what makes them open or closed? Do you consider yourself open or closed? Is one better than the other? Are we always looking for the best? Are you always looking for the best? Are we always looking? Are we always? Ah! You don't have any answer, all you want to say is "yes I am open" but deep down you're not sure if that's the case. Sorry for putting you in this situation. But don't worry, here is my corner. It's really comfortable, I'll share it with you!” – Ndayé Kouagou

The performance by Kouagou on the opening toke place at The Women’s Building and utilised an installation of industrial metal bars forming a corner, where a series of darkly colored resin treated textile works of varying dimensions are hanging. Forming a permeable corner, the skin-like darkly colored surfaces shape the intersecting meeting-point between the audience and Kouagou in his performance. At the largest window in the exhibition space, the viewer is met by a series of phrases with question marks uttered in the performance.

By conducting a spatial interrogation of ‘the corner’, the work uses language and words as individual acts always adapted to a situation and context. Immersing body politics with a phenomenology of space, Kouagou questions our incentive to initiate an open dialogue. By ways of spatially mapping out the different surfaces and underlying constructions of otherness, Will you feel comfortable in my corner? seeks to shed light on the softer notions and nuances of the other.

The title forms an open question, through which Kouagou intimately relates our notions of self in private and public space, and the comfort and discomfort felt oscillating between the two. In the performance Will you feel comfortable in my corner? Kouagou uses poetry and language in such a way as to highlight the grey areas of our dialectical modes of reasoning. The use of mundane or relatable fragments of language – fraught with uncertainty, confoundedness and clichés – connects back to an idea of resonating with the body of the viewer in their own experience of language and how it shapes their surroundings.

Biography: Ndayé Kouagou, born 1992 (France), is a performance artist, writer and sound producer based in Paris. Kouagou's practice explores text as a medium; his texts are visual, rhythmic, and performative rather than purely informative, and his work is conveyed through a variety of disciplines, which include sound pieces, installations and performance. He has presented his work among other places at Les Urbaines (Lausanne), Auto Italia South East (London), Centrale Fies (Dro/Italy) and Lafayette Anticipation (Paris) where he also launched the publishing project Young Black Romantics (YBR).

Photo: Malle Madsen

In the light of Covid-19 we follow the current situation and are taking the necessary precautions to ensure the safety of our guests.

The exhibition is generously supported by: Bikubenfonden Statens Kunstfond, København Kommune, Rådet for Visuel Kunst, INSTITUT FRANÇAIS DANEMARK, MARI KANTER arkitekter, Decor Farver, faustlight, Flügger farver, STARK, Kvindernes Bygning

Due to Covid-19, it was necessary for us to postpone the opening of Gold Loop (Triad), 2020 from Spring 8 May - 19 June to Summer 12 June - 26 July. We are following the current health situation closely and take necessary precautions to ensure the safety and security of our guests.

ARIEL presents Gold Loop (Triad), 2020, a video installation by the New York based visual artist Jen Liu. The video work Gold Loop (Triad), 2020 is the newest part of Liu’s multiannual body of work Pink Slime Caesar Shift. The multi-media work series explores themes of alternative and expanded activist networks, thematic convergences of scientific, archival, and repurposed texts and images, speculative grassroots biotech, and an aesthetics of synthetic, mutated, contemporary femininity.

Throughout the exhibition period Gold Loop (Triad), 2020 will be shown episodically. Part 1: Welcome to the Circular Economy (12.06 -  26.06), Part 2: Collective Disappearance (27.06 - 10.07), Part 3: Strong Water (11.07 - 26.07).

Situated in a blackened out exhibition space the work lets us follow the monologue of a woman. The monologue is an intricately composed story leading us through shifting desolate urban environments inhabited by strangely autonomous gold balls, boardrooms and kitchen scenes with a disquieting play on the relation between consumption and the body. The video was shot in two primary places: Dishui Lake District, China, and Birmingham UK. It explores their relationship through ghostly urban environments, as a dreamlike paradigm of global interconnectedness, making visible lines of (invisible) material consequence, looped together in circulations of resources, labor, and toxicity. In the work this relationship is embodied in women on either side of the world speaking about the physical, legal, and chemical realities of the e-waste recycling of gold, the circular economic model.  This model integrates electronics recycling as part of the design, production, and consumption structures of products – but it is also circularity as a nightmare of biological toxic fluidity, with women's bodies as terminals of industrial poison: initiated in the initial assemblage of consumer electronics, and released repeatedly with every act of recycling disassembly.

In Gold Loop (Triad), 2020, gold, and its status as a liquid commodity, reveals some of the underlying matter of economic liquidity. Here, it is a material flow of nitric, hydrochloric, and cyanide acids as it is utilized in e-waste recovery, which dominates production zones, seeping into the soil, water, distributing itself in the skin, hair, and molecules of the workers – and passing on to following generations in the form of genetic mutations. However, dissolving - what is achieved by these acids - exists in parallel as an historical means of political resistance, collective disappearance when other methods of resistance are not possible.  Dissolution - mass departure - is also an act of survival.  The biopolitical loop closes - deeply unsettled, ghostly.

Gold Loop (Triad), 2020 is financed by Arts Council England, LACMA Art + Technology Lab, and Creative Capital, with support from Swatch AIR Shanghai, Grand Union, Millennium Point, and Dance Exchange, Birmingham (UK).

JEN LIU is a visual artist based in New York and Vermont, working in video/animation, choreography, biomaterial, and painting to explore national identity, gendered economies, neoliberal industrial labor, and the re-motivating of archival artifacts.  She is a 2019 recipient of the Creative Capital Award, 2018 LACMA Art + Technology Lab grant, and 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship in Film/Video.  She has presented work at The Whitney Museum, MoMA, and The New Museum, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, DC; Royal Academy and ICA, London; Kunsthaus Zurich; Kunsthalle Wien; the Aspen Museum of Art; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; MUSAC, Leon; UCCA and A07 @ 798, Beijing; and the 2014 Shanghai Biennale and 2019 Singapore Biennale.

Photo: Malle Madsen

FCNNNews: The Archive by FCNN is the third exhibition in ARIEL's two-year exhibition cycle. During the exhibition period, ARIEL's space is transformed into FCNNNews' news studio. A green screen room showing the three episodes in the series, FCNNNews. The exhibition marks the launch of the artist collective's third and latest episode of the works series.

With FCNNNews: The Archive, FCNN questions the news media as a genre, just as they position themselves critically towards who is allowed to tell the stories behind the news we read and watch. At the same time, the artist collective’s past production is reassessed through the subtitle: "The Archive".

The archive as a platform becomes problematic, just like the very act of archiving is presented as anything but an innocent act. FCNNNews: The Archive not only questions the existing platforms for dialogue, but also considers who gets granted the opportunity to speak, and finally, who gets archived.

During the exhibition period, ARIEL's space is transformed into FCNNNews' news studio. A green screen room showing the three episodes in the series, FCNNNews. The exhibition marks the launch of the artist collective's third and latest episode of the works series.

Biographies:
FCNN / Feminist Collective with No Name
As an open artist collective FCNN is initiated by the artists Lil B. Wachmann, Dina El Kaisy Friemuth and filmmaker Anita Beikpour. Their work is rooted in activism and spans from performance, video, text and workshops often carried out in interdisciplinary collaborations. The collective works between Berlin, New York, Beirut and Copenhagen.

Photos: Malle Madsen

Taking up the whole exhibition space, this new commision, work to further explore Astrid Svangren’s ongoing enquiry into an expanded painting practice and its fluid yet fraught relationship to the wanting to be other - to be seen, felt, vocalized and experienced as other.

In the center of the space, long locks of light grey fibers cling to a hatstand. The body of the figure is composed of wood and with the processed entangled flax fibers, hung in mid-air, it connects with the darker metallic patches of pigment on the walls, drawing in its immediate surroundings. With its condensed walls the enclosed exhibition space encapsulates a closed mise-en-scene of animated objects invoking elements of water. The surrounding structural components of the ‘figure’ on view condition that it oscillates between surface and matter, toying with whether it is supposed to be seen as inside or out. Still, it appears to be an estranged mess of materials immersed and entangled in itself, emerging before us as a disquieted Medusa from the deep.

Following I know she is light and faithless [..] as it explores the process of gradual and unconscious assimilation of ideas, knowledge or misrepresentation, it marks how concepts of gender, identity, power and sexuality adheres to some strange kind of political osmosis, where private matter becomes an act of public nuisance. Combining these heterogeneous yet sensuous materials, Svangren draws upon the figure of the Medusa both as a developmental phase of some kinds of jellyfish and a mythical being, using it to examine the undercurrents of structural discrimination, silencing and criminalisation of a feared displaced being as the monstrous outcast.

In Svangren’s expanded painting practice the audience is presented with an aesthetic presence accentuating experience and exploration as a way of understanding and recognising, thereby sharing its fluid notions of representation and vocalization of empowerment to the ‘othered’ being.

Astrid Svangren (Göteborg, Sweden, 1972) lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. Svangren graduated from Malmö Art Academy in 1998, and is represented by Gallery Christian Andersen, Copenhagen and Tracy Williams, New York. Svangrens artworks are to be found in substantial collections in Scandinavia; The National Museum of Art, Denmark, Danish Arts Foundation, Moderna Museet, Sweden, New Carlsberg Foundation amo. In 2014 Svangren received a 3-year grant from the Danish Arts Foundation. The solo exhibition In original violet / influenced transparent / feeling emerald / affected by honey yellow / worker bee / under influence of chestnut red / singing pastel dust at Gallery Christian Andersen in 2017 was awarded a prize by the Danish Arts Foundation.

ARI. Reading #3 I know she is light and faithless [..] with references to litterature.

Photos: Malle Madsen

In Mathilde Carbel’s exhibition Curtain Drop the work unfolds in two media; an image and a text. The image is located in the window of the exhibition space and shows a detailed motif engraved into an aluminum plate by a CNC cutter machine. The motif consists of a draped curtain around a doorway in a baroque room. Two small figures stand in the right side of the doorway, framed by the curtain, looking startled out into the room. A third figure is seen in the stomach of one of the figures.

In the overhang of the door, two plants of the species dandelion reflect each other, and refer to the symbol and motif used in connection with the establishment of the Women’s Building, to Carbel the dandelion also signifies resistance, witchcraft and self-will.

The text-based part of the work is a manuscript, which is found as a small gift in the plexiglass box next to the window of the exhibition space. The script is a one-act play – as a theatre play unfolded in one scene where we listen to a conversation between the characters Liz, Kip and Charlie.

With the work, Carbel takes us into an absurd scenario where the relations between the three characters are continuously dissolved and reconfigured. As the conversation progresses and we watch and read about the three characters in the image and the text, both similarities and contradictions arise in the ambiguity of the work. Between the voices and the image, Curtain Drop opens up for state of being, rather than a physical space.

Mathilde Carbel (DK) studied at CAFA, Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing, China, and later at Goldsmiths College, London, UK.

Curtain Drop by Mathilde Carbel is the first exhibition in ARIEL’s two-year exhibition cycle, and is a new commission for ARIEL.

Photos: Mounir Jonas Andersen Hammoumi