Roni Horn, The Detour of Identity, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk
Roni Horn is movement. Her unwavering explorations of media, materials, language, and identities never cease to challenge and astonish. What is photography, nature, and humanity? And are the answers the same today as they were yesterday? Horn regularly lets her works appear in new perspectives, as exemplified by this exceptionally well-executed exhibition’s dialogue with film history – and by hangs and installations that beautifully engaged with the surrounding architecture. Horn’s curiosity is infectious. The show required you to approach it with open senses and an open mind, as it was not neatly wrapped in explanatory texts. Rather, it was fluid, floating, and seductive.
Nicole Eisenman and Edith Hammar, My Eyes Are Like Funnels, My Ass Is a Hand, Moderna Museet, Stockholm
Ah, to be surrounded by Edith Hammar’s vast drawn mural Hot and Slutty Giants (2024)! The figure at the potter’s wheel in Nicole Eisenman’s Maker’s Muck (2022) certainly appears to feel quite at home in the middle of the room, even if it is mostly absorbed in its own work. Its large fingers slide endlessly through the wet clay, a material that corresponds with all the fluid elements in Hammar’s work: tears, urine, and other bodily fluids. Small but striking, this exhibition features two favourites in a single room that is queered in the most uplifting way, bursting with creativity, desire, sex, playfulness, and offbeat humour – right from the studio to the toilet.
I’m Sorry, This Space Is Reserved, Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen. Curated by Kristina Steinbock.
A multifaceted – and necessary – group exhibition about disability, presented not only as subject matter or lived experience, but also with a unique focus on the creative process and artistic materials, as in the case of blind artist Emilie L. Gossiaux’s simple and expressive drawings. The show opens up a wealth of ways to tell stories, to be seen/heard, and most works revolve around touch in every sense of the word, from forced medical treatments to the tabooed desires of non-normative bodies, as seen in Andy Coombs’s photographs. Fragile sculptures (Jesse Darling!) and confrontational video works contribute to creating an exhibition that breathes new, critical life into concepts such as difference and inclusion.
Louise Wolthers is curator and research manager at the Hasselblad Foundation in Gothenburg. Wolthers curated Innuteq Storch: Rise of the Sunken Sun for the Danish Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale. Together with her partner, artist MC Coble, she is currently presenting Things Change Anyway: Trying, Feeling at HEIRLOOM in Copenhagen, a show that takes the couple’s private photo archive as a starting point for exploring the changing nature of the body, relationships, and nature.
For this year’s contributions to the Advent Calendar, see here
