The Vision Exhibition Award

AKK - Almene Kunstklubber receives the Vision 2024 Exhibition Award for their innovative ambition to make residents in social housing areas key players on the Danish art scene. As a new nationwide network, AKK will organize six art clubs in social housing areas across Denmark and present art where people live and work.

The idea of creating AKK originates from the art club Til Vægs in AKB Copenhagen, Lundtoftegade, and AKK will organize new and established art clubs in public housing areas in Taastrup, Holstebro, Valby, Helsingør and Gellerup in Aarhus.

The aim is to create activities and community around art through strong local engagement in social housing areas. The effort will promote initiatives outside the established art scene and at the same time make contemporary art accessible to more - and more diverse - people.

“We want to create change through art. That's why our vision is to make residents in social housing central players on the Danish art scene. Together with our partners across the country, we are moving art out of institutions and into neighborhoods, giving residents and art clubs absolute autonomy. We will democratize curation and dissemination so that art becomes part of everyday life in social housing areas,” say Søren-Emil Schütt and Marie Finsten Jensen, founders and secretariat managers of AKK.

The curators Katarina Stenbeck and Carla Zaccagnini receive The Vision Exhibition Award 2023 for their exhibition idea roda – soft water on hard stone. With a focus on knowledge building and worldmaking roda charts a new course for art exhibition and production by proposing a collaborative process extended over three oceanic journeys that reverse the colonial triangular route between Africa, South America and Europe. 

roda is a two-year process that will include three sea journeys, nine art commissions and an extensive event programme in three continents. The three trips - in the opposite direction of the colonial triangular trade route - will provide the setting for conversations between artists and other thinkers about what it means to know and inhabit a world, which will materialise in new works, presentations, workshops and other activities in Nigeria, Brazil, and Denmark.

With a firm belief in the potential of art to generate new insights, the two curators, Katarina Stenbeck and Carla Zaccagnini, address the interlacing of human and more-than-human crises with roots in the colonial history of Denmark and Europe, and the related issues facing the world today.

“We believe it is necessary to challenge the Eurocentric worldview rooted in colonialism and capitalism if we are to reassess the Western way of understanding and inhabiting the world. With roda, we wish to acknowledge and listen to wisdom and forms of knowledge that can guide us towards other ways of living, learning, making, and believing,” say Katarina Stenbeck and Carla Zaccagnini.

The exhibition idea Hosting Lands encompasses knowledge about activism, grassroots movements, and radical ways of restructuring life amidst the ruins of capitalism. The movement will be creating publicly shared terrains, forest gardens and other communal spaces. They will be interacting closely with local communities, schools, kindergartens, fishermen, farmers, cultural centers, associations and residents.

At different locations – in Jutland and on Zealand, Funen and Møn – during the exhibition, from 2023-2025 – plots of land will be leased or acquired and converted into publicly owned common property. The invited Danish and international artists will unfold their respective practices at the hosting sites – together with communities of local residents and the wider public.

The idea receives the exhibition prize because it is inventively rethinking an exhibition model that becomes something more than a spectacular one-off event, while presenting collective and hyperlocal ways of living, along with new approaches to being in the World - in the cross-section between the local and the global.

Yet, it Moves! er en visionær totalinstallation, der i et samspil mellem billedkunsten og videnskaben undersøger temaet bevægelse gennem video, performance og kunstinstallationer. Udstillingen udfolder sig gennem værkerne og gør os bevidste om de komplekse mønstre af bevægelse, vi alle er en del af.

Udstillingens inviterede internationale kunstnere vil undersøge bevægelse som allesteds-nærværende fænomen sammen med førende forskere fra Niels Bohr Instituttet, CERN - Det Europæiske Center for Højenergifysik og The UC Davis Digital Humanities Laboratory på University of California.

Kunsthal Rønnebæksholm vinder med udstillingsideen Soil. Sickness. Society. Udstillingsprisen Vision 2020, idet udstillingen ifølge juryen rækker ud over en klassisk udstilling med et højaktuelt emne og en aktivistisk tilgang til at gøre kunsten til katalysator for sundhed og fællesskaber. Udstillingen vil på tværs af lokaliteter omkring Kunsthal Rønnebæksholm udforske ubalancer i forholdet mellem jord, menneske og samfund og vil med kunsten ikke blot dokumentere, men på aktivistisk vis støtte op om at helbrede psykisk mistrivsel og sygdom gennem kunsten. Udstillingsidéen har været undervejs længe, men temaerne synes i lyset af Corona-krisen mere relevante end nogensinde.

Med ideen til udstillingen Go Extreme vinder kurator Peter Ole Pedersen og Kunsthal Aarhus Udstillingsprisen Vision 2019. Ekstremsport er et vildt og vidtfavnende univers, som både byder på dyb spiritualitet og dedikeret indlevelse, men også kamp og total udmattelse. Det handler om krop og sind, og hvad den menneskelige fysik er i stand til under ekstreme forhold og radikale udfordringer. Udstillingen Go Extreme tager afsæt, der hvor billedkunst og ekstremsport mødes, og ud over kunsthallen inddrages Aarhus’ byrum til publikums møder med blandt andet BASE jumping og Mixed Martial Arts (MMA).

What potential does art and museums have in an era where all individuals are constantly faced by demands for self-optimisation, agility and robustness? This question forms the hub of the exhibition project Work it out!, which focuses on modern working life. As part of this project, KUNSTEN Museum of Modern Art will invite local workplaces to enter the museum, becoming active parts of the exhibition, and will also move museum activities out into workplaces in Aalborg. The exhibition is scheduled to open in the autumn of 2020.

In most art exhibitions, visitors will find art arranged in accordance with various established principles from the field of art history – such as chronology or genre. But what happens to the visitors’ art experience when the art is arranged according to different principles? When they are organised based on the outlook of physicists, artists or biologist, forming part of a ‘wunderkammer’ in which works of art are just one part of a teeming wealth of objects and artefacts that usually belong to settings outside of art museums? Esbjerg Art Museum explores this issue with three Wunderkammer exhibitions, all of them based on visual arts from the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Extending across three years, the intention is to create three individual exhibitions that will eventually form the basis of a new format for displaying the museum’s own collection. The first exhibition in the series will open in the autumn of 2018.

The exhibition Sisters Academy – The Boarding School invited audiences to attend a boarding school where the school system’s conventional, knowledge-based approach to learning had been replaced by one focusing on aesthetics, poetry and sensuousness. Art installations, sound design and lighting design transformed Den Frie Udstillingsbygning into an alternative, immersive exhibition (and school) experience in which 20 performers made up the teaching staff. Visitors could only enter the school by enrolling as students for 24 hours at a time. Thus, their visit involved at least one overnight stay, sleeping in the school dormitory. The exhibition period was 19 September to 18 October 2017.

Mind the Gut combines art, cultural heritage and the most recent biomedical research on how intestinal bacteria interact with the human brain. The exhibition places cutting-edge research and the most recent scientific discoveries within a wider cultural, historical and aesthetic context, thereby inviting critical reflection on how it all shapes and affects how we see ourselves as human beings. Opening on 6 October 2017, Mind the Gut is now part of the permanent display at the Medical Museion.