Sophie Z.S Suaning, Skjulested (Hiding Place), Hallen, Copenhagen
On such a rainy Sunday, just walking into Nørrebrohallen and through a smell of kids and badminton locating the tiny exhibition space Hallen. Sophie Z.S Suaning’s six paintings stand up there, and they’re magnetic, somehow slightly poisoned. Figures, perhaps dissolving or in a trance, haunt the canvases and make them loud, like transmissions of a mass from the mystical, innermost, and invisible places. These canvases feel like poems. A rain of little kisses poured out on a three-eyed face, white fear in the blood throat, insanely dim channels into, what, the rear of hearts? Something and someone are really present in the paintings; they’re the opposite of surface and have often flashed through me since I first saw them.
Lene Adler Petersen, Rummet og tingene (Space and Things), The Black Diamond, The Royal Library, Copenhagen
Ranging favourites is often difficult and unnecessary, but Lene Adler Petersen’s exhibition was truly a favourite. Consistent simplicity through many of her photo works and in her writing in particular, relationships between objects which in unsentimental, deadpan-like ways – but never ironically or povera-romanticising – are occupied with that. With essences of human. Perpetual dualisms and duo longing, the things we feel and who we are related to. The only really important matter, if you will. But in a highly prosaic manner, purged from melted pathos and pandering beauty. Adler Petersen’s gift for minor-poetic translations of human conditions is profoundly moving. She looks, and for myself and everyone I wish: to look.
Angharad Williams, The Bottom Dogs II, Simian, Copenhagen
When Simian presented Angharad Williams’s superior work Solo Performance (2025), it felt like everything was a bit wrong-sided. Freestanding, white, large as a room, and running around the cube like a frieze was a tight, slender ribbon of light. A film? But the cube was not a room, the film not a film. The ribbon of light though: a 55 metre-long roll of 35mm film. Mouth, eyes, mute speaking, it appeared like anxiety, maybe secrets. And a wrong-sided film audience, too, who had to move themselves to see the film, look at frozen images, narrow silence. So simple in an obvious way, to turn a film into an architectonic loop and stories you have to chase forward yourself – exactly such blissful simplicity distinguishes the crispiest of artworks.
– Copenhagen based Nanna Friis is one of Kunstkritikk’s regular writers and besides that a freelance art critic and curator.
For this year’s contributions to the Advent Calendar, see here
