What happens in the gentrification process when the city’s former free spaces are erased and disappear? How does this affect not only the people whose lives are not encompassed by mainstream culture, but also other – non-human – inhabitants of the city? How do we maintain spaces for shared sensual and sexual pleasure, curiosity and exploration without profit interests when the city loses its wilderness, bushes and wastelands? The background for Line Skywalker Karlström’s work at ANA will consist of the extensive research they have been involved in – devoted to the queer community in New York before and during the AIDS crisis – as it also coincided with New York being gentrified and taken over by financial investors. In ANA, they will pursue an interest in cruising in public space as a potentially productive approach to establishing a sense of belonging – outside of ownership and outside of our place in the private home. Based on this, Karlström will develop a series of new works in and for ANA, which will specifically take the form of film, textile works and performance.

Friday 14 June at 5pm, ANA and Line Skywalker Karlström invite you to a performance – walk & talk in the backyard.

During their residency at ANA, Skywalker has conducted research for the project ‘Cruising in Public Spaces’. This has led to reflections on gentrification, urban politics, reclaiming of urban spaces and much more, which will be the starting point for the event.

After Skywalker’s performance, there will be tea/coffee and a roundtable conversation between Kirsten Dufour and Skywalker and the attendees. Finally, we’ll round off with a beer – we look forward to seeing you.

The project is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation.

BIO:

Line Skywalker Karlström is born in 1971 in Karlstad, Sweden. They live and work since 2006 in Berlin. Skywalker”s work takes place in the field between embodiment and the ephemeral. Based on ‘thinking with the body’ and experiences of exclusion/inclusion their work addresses questions pertaining to  space, intimacy and art history utilizing gestures aimed at simultaneously creating representation, displacement and refusal. Line Skywalker’s work is shaped in a continuous conversation – direct and imagined, with queer and feminist practices and experiences in the past and the present, and posit questions about what art is in acts of getting inscribed in and inscribing into materials and urban and institutional space.

What is between the houses? Where can you go? Where can you play? Where are you not allowed to be? What spaces in the city do we share? Why do they look the way they do? What spaces are we missing?

Several areas in the Lundtoftegade neighbourhood, where ANA’s children’s studio is located, are currently undergoing a lot of small changes. New playgrounds are on the way, planters for the residents, a permaculture garden, a fancy outdoor restaurant, art on the walls. Both major and minor adjustments to the common spaces are being made.

This year, the theme of ANA’s children’s studio is the children’s city, where we can dream together and make models of what the city’s spaces could also look like. What would the children build if they were allowed to think wildly and freely about what could be between the houses?

In the children’s studio, we will work with urban design on a miniature scale and on an imaginary level.

Together with the children, we imagine city spaces, city commons and spaces in between, not just for children, but also for adults. What would older people – from the children’s perspective – need to gather around? What places should there be for parents, for the lonely, for babies? What could be gathered around outside, in places that were everyone’s? What would happen if you built shelters in the city, if you built outdoor kitchens or made large groups of hammocks in the trees?

In our workshops, we build small models based on our imaginations of what the city could look like. We’ll build from rubbish, found objects and purchased materials. We will also use the models as scenes for social processes and talk to the children about what scenarios could play out in the spaces they have imagined. In this way, we will explore how architecture and design influence our behaviour and ways of life. At the same time, we take the opportunity to see what’s actually in the area, and at the end of August we will create a small zine that, in addition to material from the workshops, will also contain a kind of record of all the offers and activities that the local area offers. In this way, we point to the collective space of creation that so many forces from below are always engaged in bringing to life. The conversations between us, the children and the neighbourhood actors are transcribed and implemented in the zine, which the local children can also help to create.

Practicalities:

In June, we are working in the studio to develop and plan workshops that will take place in August after the summer holidays. We will both invite local institutions and organise open workshops for anyone who is interested. Everything will be publicised on this page, on the sign at the children’s studio and at the staffed playground in Bispeengen.

* Image: Pädogogiche Aktion, Spielaktivität im Olympichen Dorf, München, 1972

BIO:

Throughout Mia Edelgart’s practice is the attempt to let emotional and bodily registers appear in the work process, to let them be information and productive tensions that (dis)enables and influence aesthetic expressions and formats. Edelgart has worked with subjects such as sleep, community, bees and stupidity. Her method consists of
investigative, collecting and corresponding processes that often come together in video works or sculptural and performative formats. Central to Edelgarts artistic work is the politics of emotions and interrelational contexts, which also forms the basis for a commitment to collective productions that mutually informs and influences Edelgart’s own work production. Edelgart often uses conversation and the interview as form and artistic method. The interview, as a format that can be manipulated, and as a fundamental interest in meeting The Other, and in what and how we can know something together. The interview works as a self-generating process that implicates the artist herself, and injects a tension between the planned and the unplanned into the work process. Mia Edelgart graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2012.

Sebastian Hedevang is a visual artist living in Copenhagen. In recent years, Hedevang’s practice has been nourished by collaborations and self-organized collective processes in various constellations. Learning from The General Past (2023) with H. Heise, A. Rønholt Schmidt, J. Funder and M. Knudsen at La Cucina, Copenhagen, The Chocolate Wagon with Andreas Rønholt Schmidt, among others. with the exhibition Sludge Cake at ANA in 2021, as well as several works and projects with Mia Edelgart where children have been the primary audience Hvad er Penge? (2021). Most recently, Hedevang has curated the exhibition Free Time (2024) with Jens Rønholt Schmidt about artists’ view on, practices and evasions in the modern renovated urban spaces driven by financial capital. The artist holds a MFA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts 2012-18 and ISP at Maumaus in 2015.

The project is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation’s Huskunstnerordningen.

I’m writing from Tallinn, where I’ve travelled to film the headquarters of the European data agency eu-LISA, which manages the EU’s digital infrastructure for security and control.

My interest in the agency began when I wanted to know more about what happens to rejected asylum seekers who have been deported. It became clear that there’s almost no knowledge produced about this in the EU. Committees and councils in various member states assign status and assess requests for protection, but seem almost demonstratively uninterested in the fate of those assessed, in case of rejection and deportation.

At EU level, precautions have been taken against re-entry through the Eurodac database, which stores profiles of asylum seekers’ biometric data and personal information for ten years. Eurodac is administered along with other personal registries of non-EU citizens from the building. From the end of 2024, biometric information will be registered for all arriving non-EU citizens under the EES (Entry/Exit System).

For months, I’ve been circling the headquarters on Google Maps. It’s somewhat like a diamond – transparent yet hard and inaccessible. The building’s automatic climate system can roll down aluminium shutters, giving it the appearance of one large block of shiny metal. That’s primarily how I’ve seen it, but now during winter, I see that the facade consists mainly of large square windows in bulletproof glass. There are cameras everywhere and signs indicating that it is prohibited to take photos. Yet, I walk to the building every day and attempt filming it from a distance. Perhaps I had imagined the building would somehow speak to me. But if it could speak, it most likely would say it has nothing to say.

The other day, I met with the architects who designed the building. They described it as the tip of an iceberg. The servers are elsewhere, the backup is stored inside a secret mountain. Although the building’s internal workings are hidden, I’ve gradually formed some understanding of what eu-LISA does and how it’s connected to other agencies like Frontex and Europol.

Today, I’ve rented a car to observe the building somewhat covertly. It’s minus ten degrees, and at the same time, I’ve become a bit paranoid that my way of moving around the building with a camera might seem suspicious, perhaps the feeling is intensified by the war in Ukraine and Tallinn’s proximity to Russia. From the car, I can see what goes in and out of the secure doors. I switch sporadically between filming the building from the backseat and reading reports from the agency’s website on my phone. I often come across the term “bona fide,” which means acting in good faith or having good intentions. Biometrics make it possible to inscribe the “border” on specific bodies and automate who is granted access. “Bona fides” are the included and welcomed ones. Those for whom registration will only make the journey “more seamless”.

The databases serve the purpose of regulating movement. But perhaps this inaccessible archive of individuals and bodies – which for good reasons cannot be made public – holds a different potential than just control. The database also constitutes a kind of memory about the banned, a document of the historical, ongoing, and intensified European practice of deportation and making people invisible.

Leaving the headquarters, I drive to the other side of Tallinn to visit the Memorial for the Victims of Communism. Two black walls form a long corridor, open at each end. On the walls are the names of the approximately 20,000 people who were deported to distant regions of the Soviet Union and never returned.

OPENING:

Friday, 26th April, from 4-7 pm.

OPENING HOURS:

Fridays and Saturdays from 12pm-5pm or by appointment (mail@nielschristensen.com)

MINI SEMINAR:

Thursday, 16th May, 5-8 pm.

In connection with the exhibition, we are inviting you the mini seminar “Deportation and the politics of (in)visibility” about post deportation risks and the almost demonstrative lack of knowledge production in the EU regarding this, and the simultaneous increasing exposure of everyone seeking access to the union.

The legal anthropologist of migration, Dr. Jill Alpes, will join online and share reflections from over ten years of research on post-deportation risks on the African continent and in the Middle East. What happens with people after deportation? Why do we not know more? Who owns the future of refugees and other migrants? She will reflect on the politics of perspectives in research, and how this connects with both the arts and activism.

PhD researcher in Political Theory at the Humboldt University of Berlin and the Free University of Berlin, Adam Bregnsbo Fastholm, will contribute with a discussion of the political aesthetics of the border, that is to say the political distribution of visibility and invisibility, legibility and illegibility, appearance and disappearance. The aesthetic struggle between migrants and authorities is ambivalent: While thousands of migrants seek to cross borders undetected, the EU has installed an extensive apparatus of surveillance, aiming to shed light on acts of unauthorized border crossings. Conversely, other migrants do everything they can to be seen, while authorities routinely conceal their own exercise of power.

BIO:

Niels Christensen (b. 1988) is an artist based in Copenhagen. He is concerned with the state’s promise of maintaining life and “security” and the simultaneous delimitation of which lives this promise applies to. His practice could also be described as a critical study of image making in relation to structural organisations of violence and care. Christensen works discursively and in different mediums, but often photography is a central element. Methodically, he borrows from disciplines such as investigative journalism, law, art history, critical theory, and philosophy. Part of his work takes place in the collaboration Evening School – an open ID with various participants, often including the writer Aske Viuff. Evening Schools’ latest work on the deportation camp Ellebæk has been shown, among other places, in Lund’s Konsthal. Niels Christensen is a graduate of the Maumaus Independent Study Program and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, where he is currently a teaching assistant at the School for Contextual and Conceptual Practices. Additionally, he has a background as a photojournalist from the Danish Media and Journalism School.

The exhibition is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation and The Council for Visual Arts.

For me wage work, children, and exhibitions have a tendency to coincide. Everything at once or nothing. In the meanwhile, I can sit for hours staring into space. I imagine it as a kind of meditation, a useful emptiness. In reality, it’s the diametrically opposite. Myriads of images at a high pace penetrating my mind. Only the wagon-wheel effect allows me to note a figure or a pattern in brief glimpses. The days I am with my daughter appear as asymmetric ornamentations in my calendar. There is nothing else in it. No narrative. Only discrepancy. As if she is the only person, I have a relation to. Part of me has deserted, I´m defeated on all levels, without precisely knowing by what and whom. Despite that, I sense that I am perceived as a danger, a threat to something. As if my naked presence, my year-end account statement, my struggle against absolute time, my staring into space, is read as something contagious, a premonition of an impending revolt.

OPENING:

Thursday March 14^th from 4-9pm.

CONVERSATION:

Thursday March 21th at 7pm

Technical Materialism and coincidences

A conversation about proces and artistic practice between artist Henriette Heise and Thomas Bo Østergaard.

OPENING HOURS:

Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays from 12pm-4pm.

BIO:

Thomas Bo Østergaard (b. 1981) is an artist based in Copenhagen. He works across multiple mediums such as drawing, text, and sculpture. With his post-minimalist aesthetic, which deliberately cracks open to subtle poetic shifts of meaning, he often critically portrays the uncanny familiarity of urban landscapes. Østergaard’s artistic material is the tropes of modernist architecture and their afterlives in the spaces that define contemporary society: the home, the city, the artist’s studio, the white cube, and those of the individual and collective consciousness. He has exhibited at Den Frie, Nikolaj Kunsthal, Overgaden, Kunsthal Aarhus, Ringsted galleriet, Galleri C.C.C, Kristiansand Kunsthal, Inter.Pblc and Simian. He has also taken part in several seminars and been giving lectures at University of Southern Denmark and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen where he is also educated.

The exhibition is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation and The Municipality of Copenhagen – Council for Visual Arts.