AHC x Roskilde Festival 2023

Every year, the artists who participate in AHC’s Residency To-Go program have the opportunity to take part in the Roskilde Festival’s art program. And this year, all six residents accepted the invitation to participate and create a new piece for the festival’s Art Zone.

The artists were:

Sóley Ragnarsdóttir, Trine Struwe, Tore Hallas, Regitze Engelsborg Karlsen, Maria Nørholm Ramouk, and Alex/Alexandra Jönsson.

Below you can read more about each work and each artist (the texts are written by Roskilde Festival).

The works could be experienced at the Roskilde Festival from Wednesday, June 28th to Saturday, July 1st, 2023.

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SÓLEY RAGNARSDÓTTIR: More Love Hours

In recent years, Sóley Ragnarsdóttir has worked with Danish and Icelandic napkin collections dating back to 1940, inspired by her first set which she inherited from her mother and grandmother in Iceland. She approaches collecting as a feminist practice that explores heritage, memories and contemporary issues such as material pollution.

Sóley Ragnarsdóttir’s 10-meter-long artwork More Love Hours on this year’s Roskilde Festival is based on the delicate imagery found in Ragnarsdóttir’s napkin collection. The napkins have been re-composed digitally by South Korean artist Joon Yeon Park.

More Love Hours refers to the extended time spent on the laborious work of creating, but is also critical to the fact that women’s work has historically been (and still is) less valued than men’s. Through this large-scale wall piece, Sóley Ragnarsdóttir offers both personal and political perspectives for her critical reflection.

More Love Hours is supported by the Danish Art Foundation and the Beckett Foundation, printed and mounted by Københavns Skiltefabrik.
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TRINE STRUWE: Roses (Undercover, Explorer, Sexy Red)

Roskilde is a site for first loves, flings and heartaches, all those rosy clichés. Trine Struwe’s sculpture Roses (Undercover, Explorer, Sexy Red) offers the festivalgoers a point of navigation inspired by the vane on the roof. The flower is translated from physical matter into digital drawing and back again – aluminum casts of different types of roses meshed together: “Undercover”, “Explorer” and “Sexy Red”. Somewhere between intimate and generic, Trine invites us to look up and consider how the flower is intertwined with our life and language.

Roses mean everything and nothing. With connotations ranging from exquisite to tacky, roses are used for courtships, apologies, and funerals. They adorn both lingerie and tombstones. The thorny rose is often anthropomorphized as a femme fatale – the blossom attracts, but careful now! In Grimm’s ‘Sleeping Beauty’, an enchanted princess sleeps for 100 years while unsuccessful suitors die miserable deaths pierced by the hedge of thorny rose bushes that grows thick around her tower – “until at last the whole castle was hidden from view, and nothing of it could be seen but the vane on the roof”.

Roses (Undercover, Explorer, Sexy Red) is presented with support from the Danish Arts Foundation and The Danish Art Workshops.

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TORE HALLAS: You are closer to God when you do not indulge

The work You are closer to God when you do not indulge is a collection of five banners displaying large photographs of naked bodies. The work engages with the Food Is Now area, by this placement raising questions about the role of food in shaping identity and the moral compass for determining which bodies are considered worthy of respect and care by being desirable within the norm, and which are not.

The banners feature an intimate scene between fat activist Anshuman Iddamsetty and choreographer Fernando Troya. In this tender moment, the fat body is celebrated and desired, defying the idea of religious asceticism completely. By placing the fat body in relation to the thin body, which reflects the gaze of the normative, Hallas creates a space for reflection and discussion on health, sustainability, body norms, and stigmatization.

In his work, Tore Hallas often focuses on fatness and queerness – the feeling of being different from the societal norms – and the beauty and pain associated with it. The work You are closer to God when you do not indulge is based on an upcoming video work which will come out in the fall 2023.

The artwork is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation.

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REGITZE ENGELSBORG KARLSEN: A Mountain Lives Inside Me

Working with the raw materials of the earth, Regitze Engelsborg Karlsen awakens a new sensibility towards landscapes in transformation, encouraging us to have more caring and sustainable relationships with nature. In 2017, she created 15 large organic sculptures out of the soil and gravel from the festival’s camping area where she was interested in the area’s nature and geology.

At this year’s festival, Regitze Engelsborg Karlsen again focuses on the camping area with A Mountain Lives Inside Me – an artwork that examines the earth, where the many guests have their temporary home, and which will be emptied of gravel over the next 10-15 years. Her work documents a world in constant change. Through tangible materials, she connects our perceptions of the landscape and establishes narratives that lead to new encounters.

During the last days on the festival there will be a short film of her investigations on Orange and Arena stage screens where the artwork will unfold in expressive images alongside a booklet of texts and photos that will be distributed during the film.

The artwork is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation.

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MARIA NØRHOLM RAMOUK: N9drou ngharsou chejra (We could plant a Tree)

With personal, historical, and cultural symbols, Maria Nørholm Ramouk invites us into a trustworthy textile landscape that gives room for a relaxed and gentle consideration of how social and cultural conditions affect communities and their collective identities.

With the work N9drou ngharsou chejra (We could plant a Tree), Maria Nørholm Ramouk creates a sensual and embracing textile installation that is in sharp contrast to Roskilde Festival’s sometimes high tempo and raw energy. The tent-like structure is crafted in plant-dyed textiles with traditional symbols to create a place of quiet contemplation and shared soft energies.

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ALEX/ALEXANDRA JÖNSSON: Circleness

Circleness is an open-source tool to explore party communities that will come to Roskilde in 2023. In the spring of 2023, more than 70 people aged 16 to 30 participated in several Circleness workshops where party culture, insecurity in the nightlife and care was explored by creating space for somatic trust exercises, conversations, and movement to practice being supported, trusting instincts, feeling one’s own limits, and sensing the signals of other bodies.

Circleness is a collaboration between Jönsson, who works with open-source pedagogy, care organization and feminist tools in their artistic practice, performer and queer feminist artist Rikke Bogetoft from the North Electronic Music Alliance (NEMA), and Log Ladies, which specializes in building workshops for gender minorities in the construction industry.

The project has been realised in collaboration with Lím Collective and is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation and Roskilde Festival.

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Læs mere om Residency To-Go her.