For the Skabninger Samlinger performance series, we meet once a month from January to June 2026. We watch, talk about, and immerse ourselves in performance art through curated showings and artist conversations.

Each monthly gathering consists of a performance evening as well as an in-depth artist talk a few days later. The performance evenings take place at or around Astrid Noack’s Atelier and the conversations take place at COSMOS in Cph NV.

Skabninger Samlinger is curated through an open call, and the program is organized around six thematic clusters – inspired by the submitted works and practices.
Skabninger Samlinger is a place where we gather, collect, are created, and create around performance art.

Skabninger Samlinger#2 will be shown on 8 February at Astrid Noack’s Atelier from 3-8pm and discussed on 13 February at COSMOS from 5-7pm, Degnestavnen 19, 2400 Copenhagen NV – the theme is “performance writing”.

We will see performances by and talk with Jeuno JE Kim, Inga Gerner Nielsen, xiri noir and Karen Nhea Nielsen.

Registration is free, but please book a ticket at:

https://v2.billetten.dk/index/chooseprice/showid/404565/type/1?

The theme for Skabninger Samlinger #1 was ‘Performance art as a life companion’, and we saw performances by Mette Kit Jensen, Nanna Lysholt Hansen, Birgitte Ejdrup Kristensen and Ar Utke Ács.

Skabninger Samlinger is curated and organized by Storm Møller Madsen and Sara Hamming.

The performance series is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation.

We will gather again on 5 February from 5 to 9 p.m.

We will hold on to each other and to solidarity. And we will continue to insist on the right to life, freedom and dignity. For a free Palestine.

On 5 February, we will once again open the doors to ANA and invite you in for an evening of solidarity.

The evening will feature book sales, readings, performances, music, food, a bar and a raffle – a shared space for presence, resistance and care.

All donations will go directly to the Tamar Institute, which works for Palestinian children’s right to education, art and culture.

The event is created in solidarity, and we want to bring together art, literature and community as a way to keep our eyes open, our hearts open and our voices alive.

Come and support!

Admission:

75–125 kr. (including food, readings and performance)

In addition, there is the opportunity to support further by purchasing books and raffle tickets.

For a free Palestine.

The conditions of life and security guaranteed by the European welfare states to its citizens are continuously and increasingly premised on forms of border violence that operate in a double movement. On the one hand, the perimeter of Schengen as well as individual nation-state borders are becoming ever more heavily fortified; on the other, borders are becoming fluid and omnipresent through processes of border externalisation, surveillance, automated digital registration and classification of bodies.

Since the exhibition of the work-in-progress film work Body Bona Fide #1 at Astrid Noacks Atelier in 2024, the following considerations have guided my ongoing engagement with the infrastructure of datafication within the European Union. The border regime – with its policy, institutions and technologies – constitutes an integral component of the conditions for my own subjectivity. However, such contingencies are continuously flattened in favor of an endless circulation of signs that (falsely) claim to rest upon themselves – the Nation, European identity, “the people”, the welfare state, liberal democracy etc. But at the same time an unmasking is taking place. As these myths can no longer be hidden and it becomes obvious that the signified are in fact constituted in -and upheld through violence, increasingly also the violence is openly acknowledged, circulated, defended and hailed. Yet, the majority of those who have the right to mobility, the so-called bona fides, inhabit and move in sites and corridors, where myth and ideology conceal themselves in plain sight. If the border regime is to be challenged, such places must be made perceptible in their structural, linguistic, material and historical contingency. They must be (re)linked to the power apparatus.

My current work is partially funded by an EU research grant, but perhaps more importantly, not only do central infrastructures of the border regime – such as the European Agency for Large-Scale IT Systems (eu-LISA), which stores and manages biometrics – produce information I rely on directly in my work, they also form part of and are validated through the same sphere of knowledge as any critique I might articulate. The film I envision cannot, then, merely produce “objective knowing,” but must test possible and impossible ways of disturbing the arrangement of these shared complicities.

During this second stay at Astrid Noacks Atelier – which I consider more as another point of departure than as a conclusion for the film project – these considerations will be developed in a lecture performance, where I will also be showing new material recorded during a recent family trip to St. Johann im Pongau, in the Salzburg region of Austria. Few places in Europe so vividly embody the myth of a stable European identity. Here, within a mountain, in the underground military facility Einsatzzentrale Basisraum, eu-LISA is said to store its backup of databases containing millions of digital identities, fingerprints and face scans of people on the move – among them the Eurodac biometric database of asylum seekers.

PROGRAMME:

Still image from Coenaesthesis – It Is Not Even True That There Is Air Between Us, Kajsa Dahlberg, 2023.

Within the group, one becomes conscious of one’s living and one’s thinking, and the impulses to live and to think that had come to a halt in personal life are concentrated there.

– Carla Lonzi, 1978

Sensations are relational, yet trauma and anxiety often enforce individualization and separation. For Italian feminist and art critic Carla Lonzi, it was within the collective conversation that one could find the impulse to think and to live. This is the space where we find forces to change what holds us back, personally as well as politically. High Sensitivity Media Group seeks to socialize the foreclosed histories and relations that haunt our sensuousness by the “contradictory, unresolved, open and expansive” aspect of mediation – to use M.E. O’Brien’s and Eman Abdelhadi’s way of describing oral histories. At this point in time, a historic moment of manifold crises, we feel the urge to get together at Astrid Noack’s Atelier in order to collectivize ungraspable and unexpressed sensations spanning anxiety and desire, and to collectively consider the ways in which we mediate these.

In a series of public sessions, we will explore media technologies such as film, audio recording and transcription processing crisis, trauma and desire. Just as we can do with our bodies, we can use these technologies to socialize histories, situations and experiences. We will practice scores for conversations in which expression and mediation are combined to create a situation in which something unexpected is to arise. We draw and build on practices and thoughts across histories, which emphasize the sensuous and historical aspect of social relations. O’Brien’s and Abdelhadi’s novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072 (Common Notions 2022) imagines revolutionary futures through fictional oral histories. Their work links narratives of personal and collective trauma and healing to speculative accounts of social transformation. In Danish, dramaturg Ulla Ryum’s practice of non-linear storytelling makes space for the unexpected by inviting the viewer to search “around in the course of the story.”

High Sensitivity Media Group is initiated by visual artist and researcher Kajsa Dahlberg (SE/NO) and writer, art critic, and researcher Frida Sandström (SE/DK). The project is manifested in two parts at Astrid Noack’s Atelier during 2025-2026 and departs from Dahlberg’s research on film’s capacity to disrupt our preestablished modes of attention, and thereby to help us imagine something that is beyond what we think we can see; and Sandström’s writing practice and research in feminist consciousness-raising transcription practices in the era of sexual liberation in Italy in the late 1960s and early 1970s Italy. Moreover, the project draws on practices of organic psychodynamic group therapy, developed by Lisbeth W. Sørensen – an important source for the autonomous and queer milieu in Copenhagen for more than two decades. We see these methods illuminated today by a younger generation of therapists, artists, writers, and feminists, and we see ourselves as part of that movement. Considering the relations between oral history, feminist consciousness-raising and anti-psychiatric group practices, we want to engage in the mediations of these practices, not as reproductions of events, but as an integrated part of collective action. The group therapy model becomes reminiscent of the collective work of art.

In conversation with Eva la Cour, Mia Edelgard, Cara Tolmie, Joen Vedel, Lisbeth W. Sørensen, and M.E. O’Brien, we will develop documents and group practices that reflect their own collective forms. Imagining the ways in which Astrid Noack shared her practice with friends, colleagues and neighbors, the project takes its starting point in intimate relations. It centers on developing scores for mediation that reflect social relations, experiences and communalities – a kind of sensory media needed for envisioning public forms and collective lives otherwise.

PROGRAM:

Tuesday 16 September, 18:00 – 19:00. Location: YNKB, Baldersgade 70, 2200 Copenhagen.

Reading group session #1

After Accountability: A Critical Genealogy of a Concept by Pinko Collective (2023)

This reading group is open for everyone, however if you want to be informed about the reading, email fvsandstrom[at]gmail.com for information about the readings.

Wednesday 17 September, 17:00 – 19:00. Location: ANA.

Opening of High Sensitivity Media Group at Astrid Noack’s Atelier

Public conversation between Frida Sandström and Kajsa Dahlberg. Opening the program at Astrid Noack’s Atelier, Sandström and Dahlberg will interweave their practices and thinking of transcription and film in conversation, moving from cinema archives to the Italian 1970s and back.

Tuesday 23 September, 18:00 – 19:00. Location: YNKB, Baldersgade 70, 2200 Copenhagen.

Reading group session #2

After Accountability: A Critical Genealogy of a Concept by Pinko Collective (2023)

This reading group is open for everyone, however if you want to be informed about the reading, email fvsandstrom[at]gmail.com for information about the readings.

Wednesday 24 September, 17:00 – 19:00. Location: ANA.

Highly Sensitive Media, a public screening program with Kajsa Dahlberg, Cara Tolmie, Mia Edelgart, Eva la Cour and Joen Vedel, followed by a conversation between Joen Vedel, Frida Sandström and Kajsa Dahlberg.

Tuesday 30 September, 18:00 – 19:00. Location: YNKB, Baldersgade 70, 2200 Copenhagen.

Reading group session #3

After Accountability: A Critical Genealogy of a Concept by Pinko Collective (2023)

This reading group is open for everyone, however if you want to be informed about the reading, email fvsandstrom[at]gmail.com for information about the readings.

Thursday 2 October, 17:00 – 19:00. Location: ANA.

Conversation and highly sensitive mediation with and by Cara Tolmie, Mia Edelgart, Eva la Cour, Frida Sandström and Kajsa Dahlberg. Sandström and Dahlberg have invited Tolmie, Edelgart, la Cour, together with whom they have developed a collective score for documenting a group conversation that self-reflects its own vulnerability.

Sunday 5 October, 12:00 – 15:00. Location: Opuc, Nørregade 11, 1. sal, 3300 Frederiksværk.

Workshop and conversation with Lisbeth W. Sørensen. Maximum number of participants to be confirmed. Registration needed  – email fvsandstrom[at]gmail.com by the 29th of September.

In this workshop, we will be guided by organic psychotherapist Lisbeth W. Sørensen through a group practice of centering, call and response and system oriented training, in which analogue film and manual transcription, introduced by Dahlberg and Sandström, are deployed as forms that both extend and reflect the practice.

Wednesday 8 October, 17:00 – 19:00. Location: ANA.

Based on her practice as a psychoanalyst, former coordinator of the Trans Oral History Project, and the book projects After Accountability: A Critical Genealogy of a Concept (Pinko Collective, 2023), Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (Pluto Press, 2023) and Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (together with Eman Abdelhadi, Common Notions, 2022), M.E. O’Brien will introduce her work on the relation between oral histories and psychoanalysis, followed by a conversation between M.E. O’Brien and Frida Sandström. This event is funded by OIKOS: Omsorg og Krise i det 21. Århundrede, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen.

The project is supported by the Danish Art’s Foundation.

BIO:

Frida Sandström is a writer and critic based in Copenhagen. She has recently completed her PhD thesis on feminist critiques of art and sexuality; Dropout Subjects. Jill Johnston’s and Carla Lonzi’s Disintegration and Deculturalization of Art Criticism as Social Critique in 1969. Sandström’s essays, articles and art criticism are published widely in Sweden and internationally, and her curatorial, critical and artistic projects often evolve in collaboration. She is editorial board member of the transdisciplinary academic journal Woman, Gender & Research and a contributing editor of the Swedish art journal Paletten. She is in her 4th year of a therapist-training program with a focus on system-centered therapy at Opuc.

Kajsa Dahlberg is a visual artist and researcher whose work is informed by queer life practices – its theories, and affinities. Dahlberg’s work investigates things like the materiality of film based on a desire to problematize the medium’s relation to representation, including the relations between the artist and the object of investigation. Dahlberg received her MFA at The Art Academy in Malmö 1998–2003 and was a studio fellow at the Whitney Program in New York 2007–08. She finished her PhD Tidal Zones – Filming Between Life and Images, which examines how non-human life-forms are part of shaping (our human) visual culture, from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 2024.

Cara Tolmie spends much of her time oscillating between contexts as an artist, musician, performer, DJ, pedagogue and researcher. Her practice at large investigates the complexity of the bind between the voice and body – how voice can traverse internal and external realities of both the sounder and listener, and how it can research various qualities of embodiment, both pleasurable and disorienting. Within this she often explores performative techniques that dis-/reorient the listening relationship between the singer and her audience through live uses of defamiliarised, uncanny, and repetitive vocalisation. Cara is currently a PhD candidate in Critical Sonic Practice at Konstfack, Stockholm.

Eva la Cour is a visual artist working across academic research and image-making, often through long-term collaborative constellations. Her practice involves process-oriented filmmaking to explore the role of art in relation to Danish colonial history and its entanglement with present-day ecological and social crises. She holds a practice-based PhD in artistic research from HDK-Valand (University of Gothenburg), where her thesis examined relational practice through collaborative live editing. She is currently a postdoc at the Department of Art and Cultural Studies and the Center for Applied Ecological Thinking (CAPE), University of Copenhagen.

Joen Vedel is a visual artist, writer and researcher, educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Whitney Independent Study Program in New York and PhD in Artistic research at the Academy of Fine Arts in Trondheim. Vedel primarily works with video, sound, text, performance and in various forms of collaborations. He has been a member of numerous artist and activist collectives and self-organized spaces. He has exhibited widely internationally and participated at Documenta 15 in Kassel, amongst others.

Mia Edelgart is a visual artist who works non media specified, varying between collective and singular processes. Her works unfold in relation to long-lasting research processes, often involving interviews and conversations in various ways. She has often worked from an interest in relational intelligence, knowledge hierarchies and learning processes. As a pivotal part of her practice she is engaged in various self-organized (art)schools and collectives as means of facilitating alternative spaces for learning, sensing and sharing. Besides, Edelgart is in her 4th year of a therapist-training program with a focus on system-centered therapy at Opuc.

Lisbeth W. Sørensen is a psychotherapist with specialization in embodied relational processes. She has trained in body-psychotherapy, gestalt therapy, organic, psychodynamic therapy and Systems-Centered Therapy. Sørensen is founder and daily leader of Opuc.

M.E. O’Brien writes and speaks on gender freedom and capitalism. She has written two books: Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (Pluto Press, 2023) and a co-authored speculative novel, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (Common Notions, 2022). She is a member of the editorial collective of Pinko, a magazine of gay communism. Her work on family abolition has been translated into Chinese, German, Greek, French, Spanish, Catalan, and Turkish. Previously, she coordinated the New York City Trans Oral History Project, and worked in HIV and AIDS activism and services. She completed a PhD at NYU, where she wrote on how capitalism shaped New York City’s LGBTQ social movements.