AHC presents five artists at Roskilde Festival 2024
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For the second year in a row, AHC has entered an exciting collaboration with Roskilde Festival and presents five artists to contribute with a site-specific work forthis year’s Art & Activism program.
Roskilde Festival is a child of the youth rebellion, and since its inception in 1971, art and activism have played a central role. Its historical roots, combined with the openness of the audience, are decisive for the curatorial framework and are closely linked to the Roskilde Festival group’s strategic ambition to be a sustainable community that moves people, inspires the outside world and shows the way to make a difference.
As part of the Residency To Go program, every year AHC offers artists the opportunity to create a work for Roskilde Festival’s Art & Activism program and try their hand at a very special platform for public art and an unusually large audience. This year, five residency artists have agreed to create works for the festival, they are: Banaan Al-Nasser, Jean Marc Routhier, Jonas Kjeldgaard Sørensen, Rasmus Søndergaard Johannsen and Yujin Jung.
The utopian peace
The five artists have created site-specific works which are located all over the festival area. Already during the warm-up days, you can experience Jonas Kjeldgaard Sørensen’s performance The Wagon of Mutter Courage, which takes place on Monday and Tuesday at Flokkr.
In this performance, Sørensen’s character the Weapon Sharpener returns with his followers. Dressed in black sequined suits, they will put on a spectacular performance, pulling around an old cart carrying a construction of the tip of a F-35 fighter jet. Sørensen insists that the concept of ‘peace’ is a false premise because we are always at war – we are either fighting, or preparing for it.
On the festival site, Banaan Al-Nasser will present Gloria’s facade in the same blue color as the UN logo. A color that you see on tents in refugee camps and on journalists’ vests and helmets when they report from war zones and conflict areas. Inside Gloria, the multi-media installation In Memory of Home unfolds, where different voices find a common narrative rooted in negotiations about home. Al-Nasser addresses how feelings of belonging are deeply rooted in memories and connections to crops, family generations, food, faith, rights to and loss of physical space and land to call home. At the same time, she asks the question whether it is only a utopia to have equal rights between all human beings.
The South Korean artist Yujin Jung also turns the gaze towards her origins in her pieces for Roskilde Festival. Field recordings of cyclical waves and industrial sounds intertwine with storytelling by the haenyeo (sea women) as Jung prepares a ritual seaweed soup on Thursday in Food is Now. With the performance Ceremonial Recurrence, she invites the festival guests to reflect on the cyclical waves of life and how a holistic view of nature can change our view of life and how everything resurrects.
In addition to the performance, the audiovisual work Longing Energies: Ceremonial Demise, created in collaboration with artist Gabriel Bott, will be showed several times on the screens next to Orange Stage.
Individual escapism in collective utopia
In The Garden on the festival site, Rasmus Søndergaard Johannsen presents his glass mosaic sculpture, Bow. The sculpture explores the ideologically driven textile production in Russia in the beginning of the 20th century, which was characterized by a specific aesthetic in terms of color fields, lines and basic geometric shapes. Today, the aesthetic continues to be an expression of a utopia, where artistic communities once sought to break down hierarchical structures in society and the barriers between art, craft and industrial production.
The sculpture acts as an extension of the collective symbol or a totem, which will create a space on the festival site where you can find peace and retreat from the intensity of the festival.
In the same area, Jean Marc Routhier has created the work Untitled “May the rain fall at proper time” 2, stretched between two high points. These steel wires carry colorful ‘flags’, inspired by Tibetan prayer flags, composed of candy banknotes and contrasting objects that create a dialogue between the spiritual and the material. The flags are painted with epoxy and thus stiffened in their movement. In this way, the installation invites us to reflect on the transience of the moment and the festival in a frozen moment.
This press release contains excerpts from work texts, produced by the curatorial team behind Art & Activism at Roskilde Festival.
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PROGRAM
Jonas Kjeldgaard Sørensen: The Wagon of Mutter Courage
Monday 1 July 2.45PM., Flokkr
Tuesday 2 July, 11.15AM, Flokkr
Banaan Al-Nasser: In Memory of Home
3–6 July, Gloria
Jean Marc Routhier: Untitled “May the rain fall at proper time” 2
3.–6. July, Festival site
Rasmus Søndergaard Johannsen: Bow
3.-6. July, Festival site
Yujin Jung: Longing Energies: Ceremonial Recurrence
Thursday 4 July, 11.30, Food Is Now
3-6 July, the screens at Orange Stage
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BANAAN AL-NASSER
Banaan Al-Nasser (b. 1982) is a Jordanian/Palestinian mixed-media artist. In her practice, she investigates identity and cultural issues. Banaan Al-Nasser’s works are often decidedly social, poetic and political. Her life experience has led her to juxtapose and examine spirituality, creativity and human values in both the Middle East and the West. Her works often take the form of everyday objects, charged with symbolic value that crosses and challenges national borders, class divisions and cultural narratives.
Banaan Al-Nasser, MFA graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2018. Her works have been exhibited at venues including ARoS Aarhus Art Museum (Aarhus), Fatamorgana (Copenhagen) and Betty Nansen Teatret (Copenhagen).
JEAN MARC ROUTHIER
Jean Marc Routhier (b. 1987) is based in Copenhagen. He graduated from the Sculpture School at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2015 of which three years took place at the Universität der Künste in Berlin.
Routhier works experimentally and cross-media, both in his individual practice, where he mainly works with print, sculpture, and installation, and in various artistic and curatorial collaborations. His work is conceptual and often balanced between pure abstractions and the informative. Through the works, Routhier examines questions about the construction of a subject and the existence of an objective truth.
JONAS KJELDGAARD SØRENSEN
Jonas Kjeldgaard Sørensen (b. 1993) graduated from the Funen Art Academy in 2018. Since, he has developed a performative praxis that tells stories about our contemporary imagination. By dealing with historical research through the lens of speculative narratives, he imagines other realities instead of accepting the existing.
For the exhibition William, it’s not a dream at TRANSIT in 2022, he created the alter ego THE WEAPON GRINDER, to allow him to see the warzone as a showroom. Seen as the SKJALD of The War Machine, the figure navigates through topics of contemporary brutality, the liquid genealogy, and the collapse of masculinity.
Singing has recently entered the praxis, as a seductive force, to sing forward the dark spirit of capitalism. He performs in fictions, with theatrical awareness, and has shown his work internationally. This autumn he is touring with the new performance Spittoons and Black whole.
RASMUS SØNDERGAARD JOHANNSEN
Rasmus Søndergaard Johannsen creates process-lead works with a strong focus on textile art. The repetitive processes involved in production, rhythms of action and pattern repeats typically provide the starting point for the content and form of his long-term projects, which require extensive familiarisation with intricate work techniques.
Rasmus Søndergaard Johannsen studied at Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, exhibited at Kunstverein Göttingen, Kunsthalle Darmstadt and KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin and is initiator and curator of the exhibition space Kunsthal Thy that opened in 2023.
YUJIN JUNG
Yujin Jung (b. 1988, South Korea) explores cultural and philosophical implications of folklore, oral history and myth through sound, voice, text and moving images to contemplate our contemporary world and current climate through diverse forms of sound installation and narrative-based sonic-visual work.
holds a BA in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths College in London (2013), and a MA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen (2021). Her most recent solo exhibition was Intervals #2 at PLATFORM in Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen (2022), and she participated in the jury-selected group exhibition OPEN SYSTEM at UKS in Oslo (2023). She received work grants from The Danish Arts Foundation for the years of 2022/23.
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ABOUT ART HUB COPENHAGEN
Art Hub Copenhagen (AHC) is an art institution in Copenhagen, which aims, among other things, to support and promote the work of professional visual artists and to qualify the public conversation about art and artistic practice.
AHC’s programs and initiatives unfold, among other things, through residencies, public events, communication and knowledge sharing in a number of different formats and on different platforms.
Residency To Go is not a traditional residency, but a program that takes place in the artist’s own studio. This means that the program is only for visual artists who already have their own studio, but want sparring and help to lift and develop their practice as an artist.
A significant part of Residency To Go consists of networking, sparring sessions with curators and mentors, based in Denmark and Skåne, as well as sparring with AHC’s management team and an advisory session with an art consultant.