Photo 1: Kenneth Stjernegaard. Photo 2: Lars Gundersen
Please join us on Wednesday, September 9, from 5–6 pm for an artist talk between Michael Kvium and Jeannette Ehlers, moderated by Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt, Associate Professor in Performance Studies and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen.
In connection with Kvium’s current presentation at the gallery, this intergenerational conversation brings together two distinct artistic practices to explore performance, video art and the body as both material and a site of meaning.
The event is free, but capacity is limited. Please RSVP by emailing: josefine@nilsstaerk.dk.
The talk will be held in Danish.
Read more about the presentation
Michael Kvium:
Michael Kvium portrays the follies of humankind. For almost half a century, his artistic exploration of the suppressed aspects of humanity, has led him across a wide array of artistic mediums. Creating images resonant with theatrical qualities, rooted in his early engagement with performance art in the 80s. Kvium’s paintings are like scenes of a play engaging in grandiose or gloomy emotions, while posing critical questions about morality, idiocies, and the rise and fall of Western civilization. The works are an invitation to the viewer, to engage in reflective introspection, to share the stage and ponder.
In 2017 Kvium presented his largest exhibition to date, Circus Europa, a giant total installation first presented at ARKEN (DK) and later traveled to Kunsthal Rotterdam. The show fused painting, sculpture, film and installation in a kaleidoscopic vision exploring the state of the world. Kvium’s work has also been the center of various solo exhibitions including SMK – National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen; ARoS – Aarhus Art Museum, Aarhus; Kunsten – Museum of Modern Art, Aalborg; Horsens Art Museum, Horsens; The Today Art Museum, Beijing; Shenzhen Guan Shanyue Art Museum, Shenzhen; and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen.
Jeannette Ehlers:
Jeannette Ehlers is a Copenhagen-based artist of Danish and Trinidadian descent whose practice takes shape experimentally across photography, video, installation, sculpture and performance. She graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2006.
Ehlers’ work often makes use of self-representation and image manipulation to bring about decolonial hauntings and disruptions. These manifestations attend to the material and affective afterlives of Denmark’s colonial impact in the Caribbean and participation in the Transatlantic Slave Trade—realities that have all too often been rendered forgettable by dominant history-writing. In the words of author Lesley-Ann Brown, “Ehlers reminds all who participate in or gaze at her work that history is not in the past.”
Ehlers insists on the possibility for empowerment and healing in her art, honouring legacies of resistance in the African diaspora. She merges the historical, the collective and the rebellious with the familial, the bodily and the poetic.
Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt:
Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt is Associate Professor in Performance Studies and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. Schmidt has a background in performance art and has formerly taught at the BA Dance, Context, Choreograohy at HZT, Berlin (2011-15).
Schmidt's research centers production aesthetics in the 20th and 21st Century: economic, temporal, and social conditions for living and working in the cultural sector of the Nordic region, often in relation to questions of representation, coloniality, and racialization.
From 2020-2024 she was the deputy director of the research center Art as Forum. She led the research project Communities of Separatism. Affects in and around separatist collectives of racialized artists and cultural workers (2022-2024) with postdoc Anna Meera Gaonkar, looking at the relation between self-organization in the cultural sector and diversity work in cultural policy. Currently she holds a writer-in-residence grant from the Velux Foundation with artist Monia Sander Haj-Mohamed, focusing on artistic infrastructures of redistribution and aesthetic justice in the context of EU border politics.
