Spring 2023 program

Established as an artists’ space for emerging voices almost forty years ago, O—Overgaden remains one of the sole art institutions in Denmark with a focus on younger artists, local and international.

This spring, O displays the first large-scale institutional shows in Scandinavia by Benedikte Bjerre and Young-jun Tak, followed by major productions by emerging artists Melanie Kitti and Nanna Elvin Hansen.

All four shows are accompanied by new editions in O’s publication series, released in print as well as online and designed by fanfare, with voices including Carina Bukuts and Pablo Larios (on Bjerre) and Övül Ö. Durmusoglu and Daniel Larkin (on Tak).

In addition, O continues to host AYE-AYE, an independent project space by Nina Beier and Simon Dybbroe Møller, situated on O’s first floor in the former directorial office. Previous displays: AYE-AYE #1 Geology / #2 Mortality / #3 Periodicity / #4 Collectivity / #5 Authority / #6 Buoyancy / #7 Security / #8 Creativity. Upcoming show, March 2023: AYE-AYE #9 Anarchy.

Finally, O has inaugurated its new event and social space, O-Rooom—refurbished by designer and artist Filip Berg to support communal culture, artistic debate, book sales, live acts, and all impromptu informalities in between.

Alongside a breadth of O-Rooom events, including Hettie Judah speaking on “Artist Mothers (and Other Parents),” O’s associate research fellow Cally Spooner expands her series of performative symposia that always feature live editing of Spoonerʼs writing-in-progress by Will Holder and a conversation with O’s director, Rhea Dall as well as guest speakers. Spooner churns this material into an essay series published in five consecutive issues of Mousse; the second, on Rehearsal, was released this January.

Benedikte Bjerre—Vault
February 18–April 30, 2023
Pointing at the absurdities of our societal circulations and infrastructure, Benedikte Bjerre’s (1987, Denmark) sculptural practice employs recognizable everyday objects—washing machines, coffee makers, diapers, bread loaves, and helium balloon chickens. In Bjerre’s first grand-scale institutional solo show in her native Denmark, a new series of monolithic, human-sized silvery vessels, shaped like arches cut in half and modeled on FedEx air cargo containers, takes center stage. Minimal and sealed, they indicate the commercial logic of access for the few, in the space odyssey of our contemporary condition: who can and cannot benefit from its sci-fi portals of 24-hour delivery?

Young-jun Tak: Doubt
February 18–April 30, 2023
Berlin-based Young-jun Tak’s (1989, South Korea) work addresses a global rise in homophobia. Changing O’s architecture into a ceremonial chapel or shrine, Tak’s first large-scale institutional solo show collects works commenting on how populist patriotism reduces tolerance and drives forward new behavioral restrictions, not least for the LGBTQIA+ community. His recent film Wish You a Lovely Sunday (2021) investigates the rituals and constraints within the spatial etiquette and hierarchy of the church and queer club, respectively. Meanwhile, a new light-piece flickers the morse code of its title, Doubt (2023), onto Chained (2020), a sculpture of ten Christ-figures chained arm-in-arm and clad in anti-queer slogans.

Nanna Elvin Hansen
May 27–August 6, 2023
The practice of Nanna Elvin Hansen (1989, Denmark) moves in the murk between art and activism. Building audio and film projects via local, collaborative processes, her works unveil structural violence that impacts on human rights and displacement. For O, her speculative forensics track Nordic colonial excavation, questioning Scandinavia’s unexposed structural use of extraction and its ongoing consequences. In a new film and sound installation, Hansen lets the soil, ground, and geological layers speak, as material witnesses to Nordic territoriality.

Melanie Kitti
May 27–August 6, 2023
Melanie Kitti’s (1986, Sweden) writing and visual arts practice stems from a place of disruption, fragmentation, discontinuity. Her acclaimed literary debut, Halvt Urne Halv Gral (2022), collects succinct if fleeting notes on a family—and consequently a mental state—about to dissolve. Employing DIY-fresco techniques or figuration on pillows or upholstery, her painterly practice uses materials impossible to preserve, creating a frailty always at risk of imploding. For her grand solo show at O, the kunsthalle’s historic function as a printing house spurs a new series of paper-led works alongside hand-printed flyers, claiming space for Kitti’s anti-racist public voice to transgress the institutional framework.

For inquiries please contact: Rhea Dall, Director and Chief Curator, or Maria Kamilla Larsen, Press Coordinator.

Support: O’s main funder is the Danish Arts Foundation. Further generous supporters include Aage and Johanne Louis-Hansen’s Foundation, the Augustinus Foundation, the New Carlsberg Foundation, Beckett-Fonden, and the A.P. Moller Foundation.