1000 x Dorthe I’m a Barbiegirl in a Horrorworld, Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition 2025, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen
For the annual juried Spring Exhibition, this year’s curators, artist collective coyote, selected a contribution by 1000 x Dorthe I’m a Barbiegirl in a Horrorworld, an anonymous artist group whose members met at a refuge for women fleeing domestic abuse. The uncanny and extremely violent installation, Christmas at the Crisis Centre (2024), occupied an entire room and consisted of elements from a temporary home found in the midst of a crisis: an overturned pamphlet stand; a play castle filled with glitter and Barbie dolls; a floor plan of a flat; a projection featuring a gigantic leather sofa. On a personal as well as an aesthetic level, this installation was among the most original things we have seen in Denmark for a long time.
Reba Maybury, Private Life, O-Overgaden, Copenhagen
At the preview of the exhibition featuring British-Pakistani artist Reba Maybury, we were slightly hungover and more preoccupied with getting hold of some sparkling water with the least possible embarrassment and disruption to the welcome speech, than we were with actually listening to it. This turned out to be to our advantage once we entered the exhibition itself, which was tight, complex, and perfectly surprising. There we were, standing among paint-by-numbers versions of Edgar Degas’s peeping-tom gaze on sex workers washing themselves after work – painted by Maybury’s subs (the artist also works as a dominatrix) – and immersed in a scent intended to evoke Johnny Depp, only finally to realise that we too were being watched as we, in turn, peered at the women in the midst of their ablutions.
Illiyeen x THICKET, Rå Hal, Aarhus and Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen
This year, we witnessed THICKET – consisting of brothers Dan and Adam Kjær Nielsen – on two separate occasions performing as a symbiotic drum duo on a single shared drum kit, wearing head coverings that left only their eyes visible. Both times they played as part of Illiyeen, an ongoing project by visual artist Eliyah Mesayer: first for her solo show All Rise at Rå Hal, and later in connection with the exhibition Maybe we could both belong at Den Frie. Their performances were both wildly cathartic and deeply moving. Watching the two brothers lose and find each other in a drumming marathon is beautiful. It is also, quite simply, insanely good music.
– All all all is an exhibition platform and duo consisting of art historians Sif Lindblad and Klara Li, who have explored a range different exhibition formats since 2022. Recent projects include the Danish Pavilion, part of the international Gaza Biennale, and Ville Laurinkoski’s Love in Relief, which took the form of three 1.5-hour performances. All all all will open in new premises in April 2026.
For this year’s contributions to the Advent Calendar, see here
– Translated from Danish
