Opening – Under: festival for art spaces

Saturday, May 17th from 2:00 PM to 10:00 PM Under will open. The following events will take place during the day:

3:00 PM to 3:30 PM: Welcome speeches by the curatorial team Fafaya Mogensen and Nikolaj Stobbe and artist and author Henning Lundkvist
4:00 PM to 5:00 PM: Panel debate The future is self-organized between three of the exhibiting platforms. Moderated by Stine Hebert from PASS, Center for Practice-based Art Studies, University of Copenhagen
5:30 PM to 6:00 PM: Welcome speeches by artist Louis Scherfig and director of Den Frie Marianne Torp
6:00 PM to 10:00 PM: coyote bar
7:30 PM to 8:00 PM: performance with artist Ville Laurinkoski

The variety of contributions points to the great diversity in exhibition practices that we have witnessed in recent years. Various live formats such as performances, concerts, debates and talks are also part of the programme and help to underline the same will and desire to create a vibrant and community-seeking scene among the participating artists and platforms.

Under brings all of this together under one roof in Simian's premises in Ørestaden and over nine days it is possible to experience what is currently making this part of the contemporary art scene groundbreaking.

Welcome Readings (3:00 PM and 5:30 PM)

Under opens with a series of occasional welcome readings. We’ve invited individuals from the scene—a curator, an artist, a gallerist, an author, and the director of a local art centre.

The speeches won’t necessarily make it all clear or tie it all together. Rather, they will open the floor with a word of welcome: to the show, to the moment, to the people in the room. Or perhaps, a welcome to what we hope is still to come.

The welcome readings will be spread out during the opening day. The first reading will take place at 3:00 PM  with the second reading held at 5:30 PM. Welcome readings will be given by Director Marianne Torp, visual artist Louis Scherfig, author Henning Lundqvist, and the curatorial team behind Under, Fafaya Mogensen and Nikolaj Stobbe.

Panel Discussion: The Future is Self-Organised (4:00 PM to 5:00 PM)

The panel conversation The Future is Self-Organised brings together three platforms — Jennifee-See Alternate (Copenhagen), Skēnē (Malmö), and f.eks. (Aalborg) — for a discussion on self-organised exhibition practices and alternative forms of artistic production and presentation.

‘Self-organisation’ carries a long and important tradition within contemporary art — one that resists assimilation into institutional logics and insists on other ways of working, showing, and being together. The positions represented in this panel are part of that ongoing story. Self-organisation, as invoked here, is not a fallback plan for those positioned ‘outside’ the art world’s revolving doors. It is a conscious, persistent, and often precarious methodology — a plan in and of itself.

The speakers in this panel don’t merely operate beyond institutional frameworks; they reconfigure the very terms by which art circulates, is encountered, and accumulates meaning. The urgency of their work is real — as is the exhaustion, the autonomy, the humour, the improvisation, and the creation of social space.

In this conversation, self-organisation becomes not just a strategy of survival, but a proposal for something altogether different: a space where art is produced and presented on terms that feel possible — if not perfect — for now.

The conversation will be moderated by Stine Hebert.

Participating exhibition platforms:

All all all
Cantina
C.C.C.
Collega
coyote
f.eks.
inter.pblc.
Institut Funder Bakke
Jennifee-See Alternate
Lagune Ouest
Matteo Cantarella
Sharp Projects
Skēnē
Vermilion Sands

Source:
Simian