AHC presents two works at this year’s Roskilde Festival
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For the fourth year in a row, AHC presents and supports visual artists in collaboration with Art & Activism at Roskilde Festival. This year, artist Anna Walther and the artist group spellchestra have each been selected with one work that comments on power structures, capitalism, globalism and equality – or lack thereof – in different ways. The works can be seen from Wednesday, 1 July 2026.
Community and hope for the future. That is this year’s theme for Roskilde Festival’s Art & Activism program, which is the festival’s separate art program dedicated to supporting emerging artistic groups and creating frameworks for new artistic encounters, formats, and experiments.
Since 2022, AHC has collaborated with the curatorial team behind the Art & Activism program to present art specifically created for the festival, and this year, visual artist Anna Walther and the artist group spellchestra have been selected to create a piece.
THE DIRTY JOB
Anna Walther works with sculpture and installation and is interested in the relationship between private and public spaces. She examines, among other things, power structures, class, vulnerability, and neurodivergence through different materials, everyday objects and humour. With her art, she wants to give marginalised groups a voice and create connections and care.
At this year’s festival, she has created the work Who’s Gonna Do the Dirty Jobs, When Everyone Is Equal? An interactive installation consisting of a layer of mud and a climbing frame that festival participants are invited to climb. First, however, they have to climb the mud, which they cannot avoid getting on both their clothes and shoes.
Anna Walther wants to make the fight with the festival mud a symbol of the injustice that can arise when the notion of equality meets the real world. Because the question is: Who does the dirty work if everyone is equal? The work focuses on how the favoritism of low costs and fast production creates exploitation of labour in the global south. Here you are welcome to feel how the hard, dirty work becomes invisible in global trade structures and supply chains.
MARKET FORCES
spellchestra is a Copenhagen opera role-playing ensemble consisting of the composers, artists and musicians: Holger Hartvig, Arte Carlander, Oliver Laumann, Simin Stine Ramezanali, Mija Milovic, Stine Victoria Hyun, and Tettix Hexer.
At Roskilde Festival, spellchestra will take over the open stage Platform, which they will transform into a living marketplace with their role-playing drama Marketplace. The seven performers, who have been active on the Danish and international experimental scene in projects such as Sin & Shame, LOL Beslutning, CTM, Slim0, Hal0plus+ and Tehran, will perform as a noisy and lively bard troupe that challenges Terminus – the god of private property – armed only with the liberating power of voice and play.
In the midst of the chaos of the marketplace, tensions arise in the space, and something begins to pull the participants apart. The community of the bard troupe is put to the test, while other forces push forward and change the rules of the game. In a world where value is measured and traded, the bard troupe holds on to music and laughter as a counter-movement – an attempt to turn the game around and question the game of economics, power and the market.
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Anna Walther’s work can be experienced at the festival site from Wednesday, 1 July to Saturday, 4 July, while spellchestra will perform at Platform on Friday, 3 July at 11:45 AM and Saturday, 4 July at 2:45 PM.
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Anna Walther and spellchestra were selected to participate in Roskilde Festival via an Open Call in 2025. The Open Call was sent out to artists who have previously collaborated with AHC – as an offer to create a work for a very special platform for public art with a large audience.
Since last year’s festival, Anna Walther and spellchestra have been in close consultation with both AHC and the team behind Art & Activism about the development of the works.
spellchestra’s work, Marketplace, is a further development of a performance work they showed at AHC in November 2024.
