In Nørrebro in Copenhagen you will find LOCAL, who are among the nominees for BKF prize Artist-run Exhibition Places of the Year 2021.
LOKALE, which opened at the beginning of 2020, quickly and elegantly succeeded in rethinking corona-adapted exhibition formats, which gave the audience much-needed art meetings in the middle of a time of crisis:
In the exhibition series HERBERG for exhibitions affected by corona in the spring of 2020, the public could thus through the large windows onto Griffenfeldsgade experience several of the exhibitions that would otherwise remain unseen in closed art institutions around the country. In this way, the artist collective behind LOCAL brought the works of colleagues to the public, even though most of the community, including the art life, was shut down due to COVID-19.
Photo here and above: HERBERG for corona-affected exhibitions | LOCAL 2020. Honey Biba Becekerlee: CU in cycle (should have been shown at KH7artspace in Aarhus.) Photo: Kirstine Autzen.
HOSTEL is an example of what the people behind LOKALE are interested in: Collaboration as a premise for artistic practice, and as a meaningful strategy in interaction with the public and the individual.
"We want to examine the collaborative premises for artistic production, curation and communication," says one of LOKALE's founders, Cai Ulrich von Platen, on behalf of the entire team behind the exhibition site and the collective.
Art as encounter
A total of 17 artists and art workers today make up the collective behind LOKALE. It is large and colorful from an artistic perspective, where both practices, positions and generations spread across a varied landscape:
"We are both visual artists, performers, social practitioners and mediators. What binds the collective together is an interest in it collaborative both internally and externally. In short, central to the entire project is an idea of the art experience as one meet. A meeting that unfolds as a situation of artistic creation and investigation, and as a meeting that opens up in unexpected ways to its public,” say Cai Ulrich von Platen and his colleagues in the collective.
The people behind LOKALE have no doubt that the artist-run exhibition venues in Denmark are an indispensable part of art life:
Jesper Aabille: The city of sausages. | LOCAL 2021.
"The artist-run exhibition places not only experiment with different forms of expression, but also with the way of organizing, making institutions - showing art, approaching the public and the audience. Although LOKALE has an almost classic location in the heart of the capital, we especially pay tribute to the places that, so to speak, occupy new land and, often with a tremendous amount of time, manage to create local participation and anchoring.”
Need for sustainability in the self-organized field
If you ask the artists in LOKALE what in particular could improve the conditions for work in the self-organized field, they point to the long, hard task of creating a well-functioning exhibition space:
“It can take a long time to build a foothold and establish itself as a place in people's consciousness. Here you have to have a fairly stable economy for a number of years. The Achilles' heel for many artist-run places is the operation, but the funds that keep many of the artist-run places alive rarely support expenses for the ongoing operation," says Cai Ulrich von Platen and the colleagues at LOKALE.
Ulla Hvejsel: What? What have I been sitting in? LOCAL 2021.
"We recognize that shorter but intense impacts are absolutely meaningful for many of the artists' own initiatives. But for those who want or are forced to the long courses, it would be a great advantage, and a more sustainable way of thinking, if you don't have to start something new in order to get support."
Rethinking the way to support the small exhibition platforms and to create a more differentiated search field, so that the long cool feature is given as much support as the new and short one, is an important goal if the conditions for work in the field are to be improved, the artists believe in LOCAL:
"In light of the many well-functioning artist-run places around the country, it should become easier and easier to argue that the huge work that the artists themselves put into driving the art into reality is something like, for example the state, municipalities and housing associations can benefit greatly from support.”
The invitation is hereby passed on!
LOCAL is
KIRSTINE AUTZEN * KERSTIN BERGENDAL * ANDERS BENMOUYAL & PETER RØRBÄK * JETTE ELLGAARD * STINE LJUNGDALH * DORTE BUCHWALD * LARS GRENAAE * METTE JUUL * JESPER AABILLE * CAI ULRICH von PLATEN * MARIE ROSENKILDE LINDBERG * METTE GITZ-JOHANSEN * JULIE BJØRCHMAR KÖLLE * ÅSE EG JØRGENSEN * CAMILLA NØRGÅRD * ULLA HVEJSEL
Open / Open exhibition documentation in LOKALE 2020: Member exhibition, consisting of only borrowed objects. With the format of the exhibition, LOKALE wanted to reach out to other local players in the district. Each individual artist made contact with a local actor from Nørrebro – a nursery, a thrift store, a manakish baker, a joiner, an artist, a shoe and clothing manufacturer, a print shop, etc. Each handed in a work that was shown at their place during the exhibition period . In return, the artists lent one or more artefacts home to LOKALE: objects that were assembled into a diverse whole on a yellow shelf in the exhibition space.
GADEBIOGRAF / STREETCINEMA, LOCAL 2020: ROUNDS – Amanda Kerdahl and Jette Ellgaard | GREEN – Mette Gitz-Johansen | SUM – Cai Ulrich von Platen.
Currently in LOCAL until 31 July 2021: Bent Kyneb.
The exhibition presents Bent Kyneb's popular, political and sometimes morbidly surrealist and caricatured paintings and sculptures. 83-year-old Bent Kyneb was educated in the 1960s at the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, with e.g. Richard Mortensen as professor. Since then, he has had a steady production of paintings in particular, many of which are based on the local environment in Nørrebro.
Opening hours are Thursdays and Fridays at 11-16 and by appointment on tel. 2814 0920.