(Drawing: The Flanet wearing invisibility cloak)

In this moment of multiple crises around the world, it seems impossible to conceive of a future. How do we find the incentive to go on? How can we think differently about our future? Perhaps precedent lies with the precarious lives of artists who have come before; those who have continued in their work in spite of crisis and resistance. Artists who didn’t give up or drop out, but who passed through years of precarity and invisibility and who continued working somehow undeterred.

In 1952 – two years before she died – Astrid Noack went on a long, final journey to various places in Italy. There are three sketchbooks from this last journey, but there is only one surviving drawing where Noack leaves a trace of her own presence, sitting outside a café in Italy, drinking a cup of coffee and observing life around her. Characteristically, this drawing is almost discarded, torn from the sketchbook, a piece of the page is missing, and there’s an unreadable address written on the back of the remaining piece. In the front of the drawing, a single cup of coffee on an otherwise empty circular tabletop, contrasting a busy table in the background where five men are preoccupied with a game of dice. Noack observes the dynamic between the men meticulously — their body language reveals exactly who and what each of them is focused on. The group clearly have no idea that they are being observed; Astrid Noack is invisible to them. She takes advantage of her invisibility and shares her receptivity — along with her perspective with us: the circular table she rests her sketchbook on takes up half of the drawing. The thin lines that suggest the table have been altered twice, each time enlarging the table. She drew one version, erased it, drew a larger one, only to erase this one too. The final version of the table is now so large that it almost exceeds the borders of the page.

Some years ago, two characters appeared in my work: The Depressed Planet and The Flanet (the flat planet). They emerged as a way of dealing with a state of increasing exhaustion, a sense of an encroaching future without a future. Since then, they’ve made increasingly weary appearances in films, paintings, drawings, texts and sculptures. The materials I have chosen to render these husked figures with, tend to dissolve between an idea of their traditional use and their appearance. Sometimes the materials perform like an invisibility cloak as if The Depressed Planet and The Flanet were dressing up to disappear.

@h_heise

Opening Wednesday 17 August from 4pm-7pm

Open Saturdays 12pm-5pm or by appointment (e-mail: henrietteheise@gmail.com)

EVENT: Things Change Anyway

Saturday 3 September at 4pm, MC Coble and Louise Wolthers:

Things Change Anyway is an ongoing collaborative project by artist MC Coble and art historian Louise Wolthers. Consisting of photographs from the couple’s shared image archive, montage drawings by Coble and essays by Wolthers, it revolves around various kinds of metamorphosis in bodies, relationships, nature, and life – in all its non-binary impermanence and imperfection. Both the image flow and Coble’s drawings, a series of which will be on display at ANA at the event, convey a deliberately ‘messy’ complexity of ephemeral, bodily, and imaginary temporalities and experiences – of gender transition, ageing, and being put on hold by the system, of life after depression and ways of gaining agency. At ANA, readings from the essays include excerpts that connect themes such as photo history, abjection, trans* theory, the non-human, adoption, desire, friendship – as well as pictures never taken.

The event will be held in English.

The exhibition is supported by the Novo Nordisk Foundation and the Danish Arts Foundation. Thank you to til ANA, the Study Room at SMK and the Astrid Noack Study Collection at Holstebro Kunstmuseum.

BIO: Henriette Heise is a visual artist based in Copenhagen. Heise combines collaborative work with a more introverted studio-based practice. Heise graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in London and has since then co-founded and run several collaborative projects: The Info Centre in London, The Copenhagen Free University, the local TV-station tv-tv and most recently The Studio Whisperer’s Office. After ending 12 years of teaching at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2021, Heise is now working on a Novo Nordisk funded practice-based postdoc with the title: The Lunatic Future for the Depressed Planet and the Flanet: Learning from the late work of artists who figured out how on earth to keep going.

This discussion panel explores women artists working with sculpture. From its inception until today sculpting has been dominated by male artists, who have shaped the education and practice of sculptors through millennia. What does it mean to work as a woman in a field conventionally inscribed by masculinity? And what about the representation of women within sculpture? Women sculptors continue to be underrepresented in museum collections, exhibitions, and historical studies. Bringing together scholars and artists, this panel sheds light onto the overlooked sculpture queens of art history.

The event will be held in English from 14-15. Tickets are free and can be ordered on Billetto: https://billetto.dk/e/sculpture-queens-billetter-681200?utm_campaign=billetto+web&utm_content=2DK&utm_medium=frontpage&utm_source=billetto+advertising

Participants bio:

Kerry Greaves is Assistant Professor of Art History at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on recovering overlooked aspects of Nordic art history, feminist theory and women artists. Her book, The Danish Avant-Garde and World War II: The Helhesten Collective was published by Routledge in 2019. In 2020, she edited the anthology Modern Women Artists in the Nordic Countries, 1900-1960 (Routledge).

Amalie Skovmøller is Assistant Professor of Art History at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. She has studied sculpture from Antiquity until today, centering on artists’ workshops and crafts communities. Her book Facing the Colours of Roman Portraiture (De Gruyter, 2021) explores representation in ancient, painted Roman marble portraiture, and her upcoming book Connected by Sculpture focusses on public monumental sculpture from workshop till display.

Lea Guldditte-Hestelund is a Copenhagen-based artist who works sculpturally and performatively to examine how humans attach meaning to materials, especially in connection with the human view of the ideal body. She is a graduate of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (2015) and the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf (2013). Her recent solo exhibition at Politikens Forhal, Hissyfit (2022), narrates the mental and physical challenges related to motherhood through sculpture and installations targeting structural issues of modern health care systems and the history of misdiagnosis of women bodies.

Elisabeth Toubro is a Danish artist who has been a major contributor to the renewal of sculpture in Denmark. Born and raised in Nuuk, Toubro relocated to Copenhagen in 1977 where she attended the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She received the Eckersberg Medal in 1999 and the Thorvaldsen Medal in 2010, and in 2017, she made the Monument for Inge Lehmann at Vor Frue Plads, the first public depiction of a Danish, woman scholar. In September 2022, she will present an exhibition in collaboration with one of the most influential women sculptors of the late nineteenth century, Anne Marie Carl Nielsen, at Fuglsang Kunstmuseum.

Image published with kind permission by Lantmännens’ historical archive by The Centre for Business History, Sweden.

Welcome to an afternoon in ANA where we enquire relations of plant breeding and cultivation. How can these practices, so vital to humans’ life, be understood? What kind of wordings are used to describe them? How do wordings shape the understanding of their relations? Beginning with a preview of the film Cultivating Abundance, the afternoon will open for conversations with invested artists and researchers regarding what human relations to cultivated plants are, have been, and could become.

Background: With the establishment of the Swedish Seed Association in Svalöv, Sweden, in 1886, a modern method for plant breeding was invented that still today is in use by more or less all plant breeding industries across the globe. With a starting point in a series of restored photographs from the very first plant breeding experiments in Svalöv, as well as by the association Allkorn’s (Common Grains) initiative for the restitution of peasants’ grains, the film Cultivating Abundance enquires aspects of traditional and modern breeding and cultivation, and what this shift in method would come to mean for human and more-than-human relations. The film opens for debate regarding its ethical and aesthetic impact on culture also at a wider socio-political scope.

With artist Åsa Sonjasdotter and film maker Matilda Mester, as well as with contributions by further scholars, theorists and artists via zoom.

The film Cultivating Abundance will further be presented as part of the program “Cultivating Stories” taking place in farm fields of South Sweden July 10 and September 18, combined with a seminar at Malmö Art Museum September 17. The program is curated by Åsa Sonjasdotter and is hosted by the Peoples’ Art promotion Skåne and Malmö Art Museum.

In her practice Åsa Sonjasdotter engages in processes for the rehabilitation and re-narration of livelihood relations. Through cultivation of outlawed crops and close readings of related archival matter, lost knowledge and imagination is brought into re-existence. Her recent film Cultivating Abundance deals with ethical and aesthetic-political questions related to plant breeding. Sonjasdotter is a Doctoral Researcher in Artistic Practice at HDK-Valand, the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Matila Mester studied cinematography at Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin. As a cinematographer she has centered on documentary and experimental film forms as well as art films, and her work has been shown on numerous international film festivals and art exhibitions. In recent years she has also worked as an editor for documentary and art films. 

Naomi Hennig works as researcher, artist, curator, editor, and project coordinator. Henning is a doctoral candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London, researching agriculture and extractivism. Her current work is informed by an interest in political ecology, finance, land-use and accumulation in rural and urban contexts.

Photos: Miriam H Nielsen

Maria Nørholm Ramouk’s poetic and process-related performance work “We could go to the Sea (Nmchiw lb7re)”, takes its starting point in the feeling of longing for Africa and examines what it means to feel at home and to have a sense of belonging to more places in the world. “Nmchiw lb7re” is the Moroccan translation of “We could go to the Sea” written in Latin letters. “We could go to the Sea (Nmchiw lb7re)” is part of a long-term artistic study that, through performance, text and installation, focuses on community structures, loneliness and repetition as security. In Astrid Noack’s Atelier, the performance work, which has previously been shown at e.g. Rønnebæksholm, takes a new turn, as it is produced on site and adapted to both the old studio building and the new backyard environment in and around ANA. Dates for the performance follows.

The performance will be held on Sunday 29 May at 12 pm and at 14 pm.

Maria Nørholm Ramouk is a visual artist based in Copenhagen who primarily works in Denmark and Morocco. With a starting point in Ramouk’s own family history, she examines how resources affect the communities we identify with, as well as how these structures are organised internally. Ramouk is concerned with how social contexts, social heritage, resources and cultural conditions are closely related. Loneliness as well as finding security in communities and repetitions are some of the topics that recur in Ramouk’s artistic practice. The work is most often presented in media such as performance, text and installation.

Performers: Simin Stine Ramezanali, Luna Scales, Mia Edelgart og Maria Nørholm Ramouk.

The project is supported by The Danish Art Foundation, The Municipality of Copenhagen – Council for Visual Arts and Nørrebro Lokaludvalg.