Den Frie and Toaster present our upcoming performance festival The Performance Bulletin, which will take place from 5 to 8 June 2025. Together with Danish and international performance artists, we investigate how situational performance pieces can introduce alternative ways of engaging and experiencing contemporary art. Formed by artistic actions that disrupt our attention and open the senses, the program asks what kinds of imaginations can be activated through embodied, situated, and processual performances.

 

The program is based on close collaborations with artists, who experiment with everything from feminist openings of symbols and monuments in the city to collective dance ecstasies, vocal performances, joints dinners, performative explorations of the city’s infrastructure, and traffic hubs as well as performance pieces that slow down the pace and enhance our sensitivity. Improvisation and movement are central forces in the program, which experiment with access and negotiate the use of the public space. Celebrating the unexpected, indeterminate, and activistic impulse of performances, the program tests public attention and social processes by the happening of art.

Den Frie Udstilling was founded in 1891 and is Denmark’s oldest artists’ association. Every year, a working committee is elected from among the association’s members, who set the framework for the next exhibition. In 2025, the committee consists of members Kirsten Ortwed, Morten Stræde and Uffe Isolotto.

With the exhibition MAJOR WORKS, the focus will be on one main work from the individual artist’s production. This year, the artists have chosen one Major Work to exhibit – this can of course be understood in different ways: the best work, the most important (as designated by others), the most exhibited, the most widely known, a sketch or a model that led the work on the trail of something that turned out to be crucial. The decision about what an artist’s major work is, is often made by others than the artist – by curators, critics, perhaps even collectors, but in this exhibition the decision is put back in the hands of the artists, to let them give their own answer to what the core of their practice looks like. The concept for this year’s exhibition means that not only new works from the past year will be shown, but that on the contrary, landmark works that are representative of the individual artists’ practices will also be revisited and pointed out. Each work will stand out sharply in its own right and, as always, will be part of a collective artistic context.

This’s and that’s is American artist Amy O’Neill’s first institutional exhibition in Denmark produced in collaboration with artist Gianna Surangkanjanajai and curator Line Ebert. This’s and that’s is the third exhibition in the newly initiated OSLO programme at Den Frie, presenting commissioned solo projects produced specifically for the sub-level gallery. In an architecture of memory, the show delves into reflections on innocence and shadows cast by progress.

Inside the skeletal and reshaped structure of the previous OSLO show, a cinematic tableau of quilts, garments, and figures holding poses fills the exhibition space. The mise en scène is at a primary level both tactile and permeable: The block-patterned quilts are hung to become wall panels as well as backdrops for the attires. Similarly transformative, these textile pieces are all kinds of wearable props such as vestments, stoles, veils, and masks. Sewn into, or printed, drawn, and projected on top of all these surfaces, are mash-ups of figures that include, among others, the TV witch Witchipoo, a Frankensteinian Beethoven, Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli, and Goya’s straw doll. The dramaturgical overlay is the ancient game of snakes and ladders, offering an account of the intertwined contingencies of luck, decisions, and accountability.

On the opening night, a procession-like performance will animate the garments inside the holding environment, thereby completing the installation of the exhibition. The otherwise open choreography centers around the movement of descending and aligns with the intersections of communal actions and vulnerability. A text by commissioned writer Jennifer Krasinski will be read on the occasion and included in the exhibition pamphlet along with a contribution by Line Ebert.

Working mainly with installation, drawing, and film, both as material and form, Amy O’Neill is concerned with (over)determined spaces and symbolic intermediaries that allow the desires of makers and receivers to intersect. And much like other instances of her work, the subterranean staging at Den Frie has an indeterminate temporality, just as concerned with what is absent as with what is present in the space. The garbs’ flatness and the silhouettes’ hollowed bodies point to this a-historicity, which resonates uncannily in the current vertigo of topsy-turvy interregnums and global tipping points.

 

About the artists

Amy O’Neill began exhibiting in the late 1990s and while installation, drawing, and film can be considered as her primary mediums, her most recent works have frequently included tailored looks, prompting one to think more about socio-cultural and affective textures than the interiority of an art object. O’Neill works in New York and has had numerous solo exhibitions at institutions such as Doyers, New York; Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; MAMCO, Geneva; Swiss Institute, Paris and New York; Le Consortium, Dijon and MoMA PS1, New York.

 

Gianna Surangkanjanajai and Line Ebert co-founded and ran the exhibition space Red Tracy in Nørrebro, Copenhagen, with artist Andreas Rønholt Schmidt, from 2020-2022. They have collaborated and been in conversation since then, mainly circling around the formations of feminist attitudes and the moment these slip into public discourse. The invitation by Den Frie to work on a commission for OSLO, has given the conversation a new expression and furthermore continues the curatorial practice of Den Frie where collective efforts and durational conversations are essential.

 

About OSLO

OSLO presents three yearly exhibitions of new solo projects by contemporary artists produced specifically for Den Frie. The OSLO exhibition programme continues Den Frie’s legacy as well as historic function as ‘the artists’ house’, a space with a long history for curating exhibitions and realizing works of art in close collaboration with artists. The name OSLO is a reference to Den Frie’s location on Oslo Plads and an anagram for solo. Admission to OSLO is always free.

 

Find the exhibition pamphlet here

Find the list of works here

Find a comic here

Find Louisiana Channel’s interview with Amy O’Neill here

Crocodiles emerged around 200 million years ago, and when looking at the crocodiles that exist today, they bear a surprising resemblance to their distant ancestors. Although they have evolved over time, they nonetheless serve as windows into the past—a world before or without humans. Olesen’s crocodiles, such as The earliest Crocodilian, circa 95 million years ago or American Alligator, circa 83.5 million years ago, are made from materials like plaster, wood, chicken wire, and canvas, painted in shimmering greenish and black hues. They are both naturalistic and artificial, rough with visible traces of their physical construction and painting process—unstable as images, at once menacing and endangered. They embody a dormant wildness and velocity. Past and present seem to short-circuit, introducing a broader time horizon and evoking affects beyond the constant 24/7 attention of the present.

The exhibition by Henrik Olesen consists of new works as well as pieces created by the artist in recent years: images of raw meat printed on plastic, castings of milk cartons in epoxy, sculptural boxes with silkscreened images and texts, paintings on masonite and canvas, informational texts and flyers, and panels depicting homosexuality and punishment throughout 500 years of art history. The exhibition also includes recreations of earlier works within new installations. Images and symbols morph into one another, are consumed, and transform into an open system or food chain where hierarchies are destabilized. It is an open and unresolved universe, interwoven across themes such as vulnerability, violence, the body, identity, history and natural history, humans and animals.

The paintings, such as (rotten sun), 2020 or Body of Shit 2, 2020, reference the body’s interior and digestive system as plastic processes of absorption, breakdown, transformation, and excretion—where images and symbols are ground up and either metabolized into new energy or discarded as waste. Everything in the exhibition is shaped by a plastic consciousness and sensibility: processes of application, scraping, and the formation of new layers. The box sculptures are empty stomachs digesting their two- and three-dimensional contents. They are juxtaposed with art historical charts (with connections to sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld’s boards from the interwar period), a nonlinear collection of images that attach to and detach from concepts of bodies, power, and desire.

 

For press images please contact Nikola Nedeljkovic Gøttsche at nng@denfrie.dk

Koloristerne 2025 is continuing the renewal of the artist association that has been going on in recent years. Four of the recent members, Ida Kvetny, Asger Harbou Gjerdevik, Maria Wæhrens, and Hartmut Stockter, have collectively invited a large group of guest exhibitors working with new approaches to painting, sculpture, installation, photography, video and digital media. The 2025-exhibition will be showcasing  works by 17 of the permanent members of the group as well as 11 guest artists. The oldest artists participating is 97 years old and the youngest two are 31 years old.

Spanning different generations and media the shows’ aim is to reflect on the complex challenges of our contemporary world from a poetic and sensual point of departure; to create a space for investigations and original artistic manifestations and to challenge and transform traditional ways of working. It is vital for Koloristerne to communicate and expand their exhibition to new audiences. During the exhibition period they will thus be arranging guided tours, musical events and artist talks. More info on these events will be announced on Den Frie’s website.

The artist association Koloristerne was founded in 1932 by the artists John Christensen, Gitz Johansen, Knud Nellemose, and Povl Søndergaard, among others. Their vision was to organize and make possible an undogmatic response to the modernist art and culture of this period. The Colorists strived to present a more sensual and realistic approach to subject matter in contrast to the cool abstractions of the modernist movement. In their recent exhibitions they have purposively strived to vitalize the association and to ensure its ongoing development and diversity in relation to age and gender.