The title Plenty is taken from renowned chef and author Yotam Ottolenghi’s bestselling cookbook. Through sculpture, video and text, the works reinterpret various household items and reflect upon their function and their distribution. Food for thought: aspirational living compels consumers to endlessly trade the old for the new; capitalist individualism results in the reproduction en masse of the same; and cultivation of good conscience consumption is the psychic equivalent of waste management.

—

Cinnamon

It happened gradually and you started

To detect it

You grew shabbier and shabbier

This shabbiness was not the vain shabbiness of vintage style

Of carefully curated second-hand garments

The roughened nostalgia of temporal oblivion

It was the shabbiness of Thule, Ortlieb and Freitag

Of bicycle courier bags gone mainstream

That is the ultimate shabbiness of utilitarian ethics

Missing the glamour of the public realm

Northern efficiency aesthetics as the minima

Of demonstrable desirability

Everything on your back

Carting the means of production like a privilege

“Your day, your story!”

The day backpack and

The desire to be contained

Inside them all

Things that make the public realm appear

An inconvenience or incidental

For example: laptop, refillable drink bottle, ebooks on cultural theory and self-help, facial wipes, spare pair of underpants, portable battery pack for smartphone, keys to flat and bike, Tupperware container, mask, tissues, sweatshirt, wallet with a few different credit cards, ID from a country you aren’t in, earphones, hard-drive, hand sanitiser, bag of nuts, chargers

All were possessions

Minimal possessions

Used to distinguish you

At least nominally

You are flexible and mobile

Connected, multilingual, worldly

You tried not to fly too much

You still remembered being flattered

To go regularly to the airport

Compare airline experiences

When you flew lowcost you were doing jobs

You got used to distinguish yourself from tourists

Still

Like packhorses you were carting

The means of production

Trollies in streets, markets and airports

Showed that you needed

Your belongings close

For the threat of theft

And that you wouldn’t be yourself without them

“Don’t leave your belongings unattended

At any point during your journey.

Keep your bags zipped and keep your phone

Wallet and purse out of sight and valuables secure.”

Because everything was owned

Everyone was also a thing

The ones who left things outside

Were the ones who lived out there on a limb

The ones who owned nothing

And the ones who could afford to lose everything

Locked it all up in cases cars houses insurance packs stocks

The containers were never enough

One day while waiting

For your righteousness to be confirmed

Hold what you don’t have and get rid of it

—Eleanor Ivory Weber

OPENING: Thursday 15 August from 4pm-8pm with reading by Eleanor Ivory Weber at 7pm.

OPENING HOURS: Fridays and Saturdays from 1pm-5pm, saturday the 7th of september 2pm-6pm, or by appointment (mail@jakobohrt.com eller mail@astalynge.info)

BIOS:
Asta Lynge and Jakob Ohrt are artists who occasionally work together. Their work revolves around the notion of lifestyle often reducing it to its basic spatial, social or material conditions. Their collaborative work has been shown at O–Overgaden, Copenhagen; Cherry Hill, Cologne; Cucina, Copenhagen; Cittipunkt, Berlin; Vermilion Sands, Copenhagen and Stockholm School of Economics (with coyote).

Eleanor Ivory Weber is a writer and artist living in Brussels. In recent years her texts and performance works have been presented at C.C.C. Gallery, Copenhagen (with Philip Poppek); Wiels, Grand Casino Knokke; Woonhuis De Ateliers, Amsterdam; Etablissement d’en face, Brussels; Haus am Waldsee, Berlin; Alma Sarif, Brussels; and Kunstverein München.

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

Several areas in the Lundtoftegade neighbourhood have undergone multible changes over the past years: Including new playgrounds, plant devices for residents, a permaculture garden, a fancy outdoor restaurant, art on the outside brickwalls, and a container for art and children’s activities have moved to the area.

Both major and minor adjustments are making their way to the common and shared spaces.

The theme of the year at the container of ANA’s Mobile Children’s Studio will be: The city of children, where we can dream together, draw and produce models of what city’s spaces could also look like.

What will the children build if they think wild and freely about what could be between the houses?

In the Children’s Studio, we will work with playgrounds and public spaces in miniature scale and on an imaginary level. Together with the children, we imagine the city’s commons and spaces. What do the children think we might need to meet about in public space? What could you gather about in places that belonged to everyone? What would happen if you built free shelters in the city, what if you built outdoor kitchens or made large groups of hammocks or slides in the trees? Where is it good to play? We will focus on the playground and its history, as a space for critical reflection on the role of children and community in the city.

In the workshop, we will build models and draw, while imagining spaces, and together we can talk about what scenarios could play out in the spaces that have been made. In this way, we explore how architecture and design, influence our behaviour, dreams and ways of life.

From 20 August to 13 September 2024 we will open for drop-in workshops for anyone who wants to come and join us. We also offer dedicated workshops for local school classes, kindergartens and other childcare centres and institutions.

The Children will work with different materials such as self-hardening clay, cardboard, rubbish, wood, paper, fabric and more. We’ve prepared frames and materials for this specific occasion, making the art easy to approach.

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.