Nervetråde

Nervetråde (Nerve Fibers) revolves around the grotesque, tracing threads from the nervous sensibility of literature around 1900, when Den Frie was founded, to the frayed nerves of contemporary art. The exhibition brings together works by Danish and international artists whose works pulse with the unease and strangeness running through our time.

In Nervetråde, the grotesque emerges as a distinct way of engaging with the world, making the familiar strange through distortion, displacement and contrast. The exhibition draws inspiration from a number of Danish writers who, at the turn of the twentieth century, broke with realist modes of writing through narratives that embraced the peculiar, the morbid, the nervous and the bizarre. Their writing suggested that behind the familiar world of everyday life lay another, more unstable one; the works in the exhibition do the same.

Drawing on this strain in Danish literature, which has received renewed attention in recent years, the exhibition presents contemporary artists who, each in their own way, reshape reality through grotesque impulses and ambivalent effects. Their works bring otherwise incompatible elements—the comic and the frightening, the rational and the absurd—into proximity, creating a distorted image of the paradoxical world in which we live.

Nervetråde does not seek to soothe our nerves, but rather to set them on edge, stimulating them to unpredictable ends.

Participating artists

Kai Althoff, Lutz Bacher, Meriem Bennani & Orian Barki, Adam Christensen, Hanne Darboven, Julie Falk, Karen Kilimnik, Ville Laurinkoski, Adam Linder, Senga Nengudi, Rolf Nowotny, Samara Sallam, Agnes Scherer, Sara Sjölin, Spellchestra, Martine Syms, Alma Toaspern, Roland Topor, Peter Wächtler and Sofie Winther

Performance programme

Across three evenings during the exhibition period, we present an eccentric and off-kilter performance programme of dance, music, language and more to explore the undersides of the categories and conventions that structure the familiar world.