Abbas Akhavan: curtain call

Copenhagen Contemporary
Refshalevej 173A
1432 Copenhagen K
Phone: +45 29 89 80 87

Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek
Dantes Plads 7
556 Copenhagen V
Phone: +45 33 41 8 141

Hosting Histories: Revisiting Cultural Heritage of the Middle East and Beyond is a new three-year exhibition program (2023–25) developed in collaboration between Copenhagen Contemporary (CC) and Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek with a focus on presenting new artistic perspectives on Middle Eastern cultural heritage and its significance today. In three consecutive exhibitions, three international contemporary artists are invited to access and respond to the Glyptotek’s ancient collections. Through their own works the artists will revisit some of history’s silenced and untold stories and bring forward new perspectives on how these stories can be voiced today.

curtain call 
Abbas Akhavan’s exhibition curtain call is the first in the series and the first major presentation of Akhavan’s work in the Nordic region. The exhibition presents two of Akhavan’s largest installations on view together for the first time. The works are installed respectively in the historic exhibition galleries of the Glyptotek museum and the industrial spaces of CC. With rustic columns, vibrating analog green screens, and dusty theatre props, Akhavan re-enacts existing architectural sites as staged events displaced in time and place, and with stand-ins and placeholders for the originals.

At the Glyptotek, cast for a folly is shown exactly 20 years after the US invaded Iraq with allied countries including Denmark. The installation is a theatrical staging of a photograph of the lobby of the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad, taken shortly after it was looted during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The furniture is constructed in fragments and a Assyrian lion sculpture in heavy basalt has been resurrected out of cob, an ancient building material made from sand, clay, water, and straw. A kicked-in door has become a green screen, while water lilies float in a plastic container. 

On display at CC is variations on a folly, a monumental architectural total installation where 19 five-meter-tall columns, also made of cob, rise on a gigantic green stage functioning as a chroma key green screen. The work is a reference to the colonnade that once led up to the spectacular triumphal arch in Palmyra, Syria – a city that was once a cultural center of the ancient world and today an UNESCO world heritage site. The triumphal arch was destroyed during the Islamic State’s occupation of Palmyra in 2015. Subsequently it was replicated in marble by the British and American Institute for Digital Archaeology using 3D technology and displayed in Trafalgar Square, London.

View an artist interview with Abbas Akhavan about the exhibition here. 

The exhibition curtain call is curated by Aukje Lepoutre Ravn (CC) and Anna Kærsgaard Gregersen (Glyptotek).

About the artist
The work of Abbas Akhavan (b. 1977, Tehran, lives and works in Montreal) ranges from site-specific ephemeral installations to drawing, video, sculpture, and performance. Recent solo exhibitions include Chisenhale Gallery, London (2021), CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2019), Fogo Island Gallery (2019) and Museum Villa Stuck, Munich (2017). He has participated in group exhibitions, including the Gwangju Biennale (2023), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2022), SALT Galata, Istanbul (2017), and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2016). Akhavan is the recipient of the Fellbach Triennial Award (2017), Sobey Art Award (2015), Abraaj Group Art Prize (2014), and Berliner Kunstpreis (2012).

About Copenhagen Contemporary and the Glyptotek
Copenhagen Contemporary (CC) is Denmark’s largest center for international contemporary art. The New Carlsberg Glyptotek is a 125-year-old art museum i, housing collections of antiquities and 19th- and 20th-century Danish and French art.

Support
The three-year exhibition program Hosting Histories: Revisiting Cultural Heritage of the Middle East and Beyond is generously supported by: the Obel Family Foundation. 

Abbas Akhavan: curtain call is further supported by: the A.P. Møller Foundation, Augustinus Fonden, Aage og Johanne Louis-Hansens Fond, Sportsgoodfonden, Danish Arts Foundation, Kronprins Frederiks og Kronprinsesse Marys Fond, Grosserer L. F. Foghts Fond, Ernst B. Sund Fonden, Lizzi og Mogens Staal Fonden.