All parents – and maybe especially parents like us – who were not born in Denmark, are often worried about how much the background and baggage we carry will affect our children, as well as how our stories and experiences will follow them throughout life. At the same time, we are aware that concepts such as bilingual, immigrant, second generation, third generation will influence our children in their upbringing no matter what. Children of parents with another ethnic background know that their parents come from another country, they overhear conversations and are also told stories at home about the parents’ past, about their family, about flight and about the homeland, but much of it is still intangible. Against the background of such fragments, they fantasize further – as children often do.

In the exhibition “FABULA” we examine, partly in a newly produced cut-out animated film and partly in a series of workshops, how children of parents with a different ethnic background experience the parents’ story of flight, migration and war. In the cut-out animated film, our daughter Vida take the lead role and tells our story from her own perspective, which raises questions such as: How is the children’s knowledge of the parents’ experiences manifested – consciously and unconsciously? How does their imagination connect with reality? That, for example, you mostly see your grandparents over Viber and have to fly to another country when you have to visit them? That you can’t quite communicate in a common language?

In combination with the newly produced film, a series of workshops for the children and their parents will be hosted in ANA, where we jointly try to ‘translate’ their experiences, thoughts and memories with the help of cut-out animation, which will afterwards be presented as an installation in the room. With the help of family photographs, drawings and the children’s own words and experiences, the exhibition thus moves between the near and the far, between child and parents at the same time as it addresses complicated issues in relation to whether the parents’ traumatic experiences can be observed in the children, and whether one can track and talk about a transgenerational trauma which children in different ways are processing.

Thanks to animator Kristian Nordentoft.

OPENING:

Friday September 22 from 4pm-7pm.

EVENT:

Saturday October 14th at 4pm there will be an artist talk with Vladimir Tomić and Ana Pavlović. In continuation of the family workshops held in the previous weekends, the two artists will present the cut-out material they have produced together with the children and their parents. More info to follow.

OPENING HOURS:

It is possible to see the newly produced cut-out animation film in connection with the two closed workshops on Saturday September 30th and Saturday October 7th, both days at 11am-4pm. The exhibition will also be open on Sunday September 24th at 1pm-3pm and Saturday October 21th at 1pm-5pm and by appointment (email: vladimirtomic80@gmail.com or ananico77@gmail.com)

The exhibition is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation.

BIO: Ana Pavlović (1977, SRB/DK) was educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Art in 2014. Her work is concerned with articulations of identity and cultural differences in the wake of globalization, as well as the role stories of ‘the other’ play in our collective conscious. Ana Pavlovic’s work has received several awards and is part of the State Museum of Art collection. She exhibits both in Denmark and abroad.

BIO: Vladimir Tomić’s art films belong in the field of contemporary art as well as experimental documentary. Often with an essayist approach, main themes in his productions are inspired by very universal and human tensions, for example between the individual identity and the changing structure of the society. Tomić’s work has been awarded and shown at Berlinale Forum, NY Anthology Film Archives, IDFA and many more. His work is included in the collection of the National Gallery of Denmark. In 2022 Tomić debuted with his first auto fictional novel at publishing house Gyldendal. Tomić is originally from Sarajevo. He graduated from The Danish Royal Academy of Fine Arts, 2009.

Mud in the Earth System follows up on Rikke Luther’s The New Mud, which was presented in ANA in 2021. In the first part, Luther through a series of research-based works illuminated, how new unpredictable weather caused by climate change – which relates to human activities – creates new unpredictable mud. In the second part, Luther continues her lengthy investigations into the movements of the mud.

The exhibition partly includes new textiles, stills and research material from the on-going work in relation to the art practice-based research project The Ocean-Lands: Mud Within the Earth System. And partly a work from the former project Concrete Aesthetics: From Universal Rights to Financial Post Democracy (2017-2021). The new work which examines the new ‘mud-scapes’ in Iceland, Greenland, Svalbard and the sea-scape from the perspective of Gotland thus focuses on the social and the political, as well on acceleration and the bio-chemical effects of the mud motion in the landscape – in the geosphere and the biosphere.

For millennia, static muds facilitated cultural exchanges across legal boundaries. Warming global temperatures result in their motion. Melting glaciers and inland ice result in mud. Ancient mud-flats and swamps reclaim space as human occupation recedes. Permafrost melts and sinks; land slips; lakes recede, and their beds collapse. Swelling muds slide toward the oceans, helping to facilitate the increasingly garbled circulations of the Earth System.

As part of the larger attempt to build a new ethical and aesthetic public language capable of communicating the crisis within the Earth System the exhibition explores the social-organisational effects of ocean-land muds in motion and the bio-communicative effects of the ocean-land muds in transition.

OPENING:

Friday November 3th at 4pm-7pm.

EVENTS:

Thursday November 23th at 5pm ANA invites you to the conversation ‘Death and life in mud, a split second of 2 million years’ between Rikke Luther and geochemist Karina Krarup Sand. More info will follow.

Rikke Luther’s current work explores the new interrelations created by environmental crisis as they relate to Earth System. Those relation compass themes related to landscape, language, politics, financialisation, law, biology, and economy, that expressed in drawn images, photography and film, which can then be investigated in pedagogical situations. Since the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo in 2016, Luther has been working solo. Prior to that, she worked exclusively in collectives, co-founding Learning Site (active 2004 to 2015) and N55 (active with original members 1996 to 2003). She defended the PhD Concrete Aesthetics: From Universal Rights to Financial Post-Democracy in 2021. It will be published in 2023 with extended texts by Esther Leslie and Jaime Stapleton. Luther is currently working on a postdoctoral, practice-based artistic research with the title The Ocean-Lands: Mud Within the Earth System at the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate (CMEC), Globe Institute, Copenhagen University.