Jacob Fabricius and Lars Bang Larsen have been appointed joint directors of Art Hub Copenhagen. They will spearhead the consolidation of the Art Hub organisation, a task which involves an impending move to permanent premises in Copenhagen’s Northwest district. This setting will “constitute a physical gathering place to inspire the flourishing of Danish and international contemporary art,” according to the press release.
Fabricius arrives from Kunsthal Aarhus, where he has been director for the past five years. In 2020, he was also artistic director of the Busan Biennale in South Korea. Bang Larsen brings experience from several international collaborations – including with the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin – and has in recent months been an artistic advisor at Art Hub.
The new directors will take over for acting Director Tine Fischer, who took the helm after Art Hub’s first director, Helga Just Christoffersen, resigned. Fischer, who is chair of the board of Art Hub, said:
Art Hub is a completely new type of art institution, which – as implied by the use of the word ’hub’ – is a place in which many disciplines, methods and practices meet and interact. Art Hub is a place for development, production, research and particularly the encounter of art with its surroundings. In our efforts to anchor this cross-disciplinary institution, it is a huge asset to have been able to attract such a strong team of directors, who each bring along their international networks and their proven competencies within curation and artistic research.
Originally launched by the Bikuben Foundation in 2018, Art Hub Copenhagen is now an independent institution. Its aim is to create an interdisciplinary meeting point for the Danish and international contemporary art scenes, “with a focus on, respectively, artistic production and development, artistic research and knowledge production, networking and visibility.”
The two directors will form a united team, but Bang Larsen will have artistic research as his primary focus, while Fabricius will mainly focus on artistic production and development. The directorial team is complemented by a small team of employees who are already busy building the organisation.
Art Hub’s new directors are among the Danish art world’s most experienced and internationally prominent figures. In a joint statement, Bang Larsen and Fabricius said:
Danish and international art life needs an institution that is able to look at contemporary art from many different angles and make room for the very practice-oriented, for artistic research, and for public conversations about art. For us, Art Hub is about being a resource for growth on the art scene, about being a gathering place for artists, and about working actively to conceive and communicate art to a broader audience in new ways that reach beyond traditional formats. The goal for us is to help create a forum and initiate processes to put major portions of contemporary art into a wider context, both nationally and internationally.
Art Hub Copenhagen is currently housed in temporary premises in Copenhagen’s Vesterbro district, but will move into a permanent home in the city’s Northwest district in the autumn of 2022.
The new directors will take over on 1 June this year.
