Udvidet slægtskab (Elective Affinities)

Pia Arke (Greenland/Denmark, 1958–2007), Peter Brandt (Denmark, 1966), Mia Edelgart (Denmark, 1984), Yong Sun Gullach (Korea/Denmark, 1967), Selini Marie Halvadaki (Denmark/Greece, 1985), Elle-Mie Ejdrup Hansen (Denmark, 1958), Annarosa Krøyer Holm (Denmark, 1983), Casper Roshan Koch Hughes (India/Denmark, 1983), Jessie Kleemann (Greenland/Denmark, 1959), Astrid Noack (Denmark, 1888–1954), Morten Poulsen (Denmark, 1990), Eva Sørensen (Denmark, 1940–2019), and Joen Vedel (Denmark, 1983).

Udvidet slægtskab (Elective Affinities) examines relations, origins, and forms of belonging through a range of subjective positions, bringing together works that engage with themes of memory, colonial history, art-historical legacy, and identity.

The exhibition presents works by ten contemporary artists, born between 1958 and 1990, alongside historical works by Pia Arke, Astrid Noack, and Eva Sørensen. Here, the artists examine how personal, historical, and material connections are shaped and negotiated through experience, bodies, and materials.

The curators, visual artists Peter Brandt, Selini Marie Halvadaki and Annarosa Krøyer Holm, examine affinity through intergenerational and subjective positions. Affinity is understood as a form of chosen kinship in which connections arise through resonance. Here, affinity unfolds as a network of relations between artists, works, and narratives spanning time, bodies, and geographies. 

Kinship across time and experience
The exhibition takes its title from the American artist Hannah Wilke's (1940–1993) seminal artwork Elective Affinities (1978). Here, Wilke brings together 86 porcelain sculptures in a composition in which the relations between the individual elements and the overall structure become central. The forms are at once abstract and related to bodily forms and experience, which can be seen as a break with a minimalist tradition.

Relation as artistic methodology
For Hannah Wilke, the relational was not merely a theme. Her practice was grounded in a complex network of art-historical and cultural-historical references, feminist theory, and her own experience. Throughout her artistic practice, relation became the site where the social, the personal, and the bodily converged.

Building on Wilke’s practice, the exhibition’s curators explore the relational as an artistic form, a political position, and a way of thinking through connections. Here, subjectivity and lived experience are emphasized. From this perspective, the personal, grounded in feminist thought and methodology, is understood as a site of critical understanding and knowledge production, and as a basis for thinking about kinship across time, bodies, and lived experience.

This moment is also a historical moment
The long-standing collaboration between artists Peter Brandt, Selini Marie Halvadaki, and Annarosa Krøyer Holm began with the 2015 exhibition A Feminist Culture Reader, which brought Hannah Wilke’s artistic legacy into dialogue with the practices of contemporary artists.

This engagement continues in Udvidet Slægtskab (Elective Affinities), which brings together artists whose practices overlap in themes, methods, and experiences in the present as well as at specific historical moments.