Pelle Brage has been invited to develop a new social art project in ANA’s mobile children’s studio at Den Bemandede Legeplads in Mimersparken on Nørrebro. Under the title “The Border. A Social Sculpture Experiment”, the project in a critically playful way invites children and young people to discuss our society and the world we live in.

With a focal point in a sculptural installation consisting of a fence and a border barrier, the project investigates and further develops this temporary border. It’s about rules – why some can get through and others not. Does a visa require any specific actions? Or are there any questions you need to answer to pass the border? Do you have to be approved by the children?

The idea of ​​”The Border. A Social Sculpture Experiment” is to bring together a group of children and young people in a creative activity where the content is developed at a children’s level. This in a local area, where the children, in continuation of current initiatives and legislation (such as the ghetto law), are confronted on a daily basis with issues of discrimination and unequal access to common resources on the basis of ethnicity and nationality.

The project is supported by Huskunstnerordningen (the Danish Art Foundation)

Acts of Listening: A Common Attempt to (Re) Articulate a Feminist Position is based on the feminist video archive Let Us Speak Now, which was initiated by Kirsten Dufour and Andrea Creutz in 2002. The unfinished archive, where new voices are constantly being included, consists of more than 100 filmed interviews with artists and cultural workers from countries such as the United States, France, Armenia, the United Kingdom, South America, India and Denmark. Across generations, the archive illuminates and maps how feminist strategies have evolved over the years and how art, activism and feminism form a diverse field.

Inspired by the archive’s position of ‘listening’, and it’s polyphonic and collective method, Acts of Listening is conceptualized as a series of consecutive “files”, where the audience is invited to take part in the process when Let Us Speak Know is once again activated. With a focus on selected interviews in combination with contextualizing material and newly produced interviews, each file step by step illuminates the questions and obstacles that feminism currently faces.

The first file which is opened in ANA, and which revolves around the American part of the archive, will resemble a ‘work-archive’, where the process is in focus. In this first moment, a provisionally spatial presentation forms a framework around a series of conversations and events that provide space for collective discussion about ephemeral archives and the position of feminism today. These are arranged by visual artist Nanna Katrine Hansen and the feminist working group Ecstatic Feminists, which consists of Marie Louise Krogh, Misja Thirslund Krenchel, Merete Enggaard Jakobsen, Anna Baagø, Hannah Lutz, Kirstine Nordentoft Mose, Anne Louise Fink and Thea von der Maase.

The project is organized by curator Johanne Løgstrup, visual artist Pia Rönicke, art historian Karen Mette Fog Pedersen and curator Kathrine Bolt Rasmussen.

Peter Petersen (1953-2020) – a mourning play, takes its starting point in my father’s life and death, as well as the system that took part in killing him.

On a late Saturday morning at the end of September last year my father collapsed and died, just 67 years old. The last 15-20 years of his life were marked by depression, unemployment, illnesses, social isolation, severe opioid- and alcohol abuse, a prison sentence, an economy in ruins, and a life on the edge and the bottom of Danish society. My father belonged to that category of people that society no longer needs. He was declared a surplus citizen, an abject-subject, unproductive and reduced to a body that simply needed to be administered, through additional medication and disqualification. In addition to a huge debt and a broken-down house, he left behind large amounts of boxes full of objects he had found in the trash – everything from porcelain figures to old film projectors, things that no one saw any value in any longer. This collection of fragments from his life, his material leftovers, is the framework of the exhibition, which will take the form of several performances in Astrid Noacks Atelier.

The mourning play (’Trauerspiel’) is a dramatic genre within the baroque tragedy, where death and mourning are the main protagonists: here the decay of humans and nature are in focus, the language gets fragmented and everything appears already as a ruin, or in the process of becoming one. By leaning into this tragical theater-form I allow myself to dwell on that which is decaying, on that which is no longer. By staging my father’s life and death, I want to invite the audience to take part in the mourning-process in order to de-individualize the grief. For the mourning is not only mine, every loss also contains a political dimension. The great taboo that surrounds death, means that grief gets privatized and made into something you must get over quickly. But I do not need to get over my loss and I will not let my father’s life disappear into silence. By creating a space around his death and the anger and loneliness that simmers in my grief, I want to open up a discussion of what constitutes a mournable life.

Opening: Saturday 2 October from 16-21 with performances at 16:30, 18:00 and 19:30.

There will also be performances:

Sunday 3 October at 16:30, 18:00 and 19:30.

Wednesday 6 October at 16:30, 18:00 and 19:30.

Thursday 7 October at 16:30, 18:00 and 19:30.

Friday 8 October at 16:30, 18:00 and 19:30.

Saturday 9 October at 16:30, 18:00 and 19:30.

Registration is required at: kbr@astrid-noack.dk. You are also welcome to show up and get a free seat if there is one. The duration of the performance is approx. 40 min. There is free admission and seats for a maximum of 10 people at a time.

NOTE! After 9 October and until 24 October, the exhibition will consist of a video documentation of the performance.

The video documentation is open:

Saturday 16  and 17 Sunday October at 13-16

Saturday 23 and Sunday t24 October at 13-16.

Trailer: https://player.vimeo.com/video/609739528?h=e05d2c7f4e

The exhibition is supported by The Danish Art Foundation and the Danish Art Workshops.