works that work :: until August 30, 2009 :: Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Nyhavn 2, DK 1051 Copenhagen K.

What do a boat cruise, an airship, a room full of taut-stretched strings, a very long bench and 8 cloakroom hooks surrounded by sounds, a set of wooden building blocks, a cartoon, a sand sculpture and an oversize bed have in common?

All of them are part of the exhibition works that work which runs at Kunsthal Charlottenborg this summer. The exhibition takes up the whole first floor, then spreads into the yard and right out to Nyhavn canal. It starts from the premise that if art is to make itself visible in the summer it needs to reach people where they are: in holiday mood, open to the pleasures of life and at leisure to play.

Works that work is an exhibition that focuses on the process and the experiment, on works that don’t stop with the artist’s finishing touch, but continue to change due to the visitors contributions and interactions during the exhibition period. For example, you can spend a night at the exhibition, sleeping in a camp bed along with 11 others. Or you can go round town recording intriguing or irritating sounds that will then be included in the exhibition’s sound installation. You can take a harbour tour with DFDS Canal Tours and be treated to an alternative account of Copenhagen’s history. Or you can get clean and cool in the temporary shower out in the yard at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, surrounded by decoratively painted camper vans and a 3-metre high rocket built of sand.

By calling the exhibition works that work the curator, Charlotte Bagger Brandt, wants to signal that these are interactive works: ingeniously constructed pieces with active mechanisms. But they are also works that work upon you. Several of the artists animate new trains of thought, inviting you to step outside customary boundaries. Bagger Brandt has invited 7 groups of young artists to take part, putting the focus on contemporary art that communicates with the public and encourages active participation.

Charlotte Bagger Brandt: “The exhibition is inspired by the collective, experimental and playful exhibition Festival 200, which took place in the Charlottenborg Exhibition Building (as it was then known) over three weeks in 1969. To a great extent the exhibition functioned as an ongoing workshop “where opportunities are exploited, things arise and disappear again”, as one newspaper article put it at the time. In this sense it was akin to the exhibition that Kunsthal Charlottenborg has now invited seven groups of young artists to create. The groups involved are all dedicated to cross-fertilisation, mixing music, sound, sculpture, design and painting in their work. They are groups for whom communication plays a key role, both internally within the group and externally in relation to the exhibition’s visitors and society at large.”

Participating groups: ArtRebels (which has invited Maria Torp, Ultra Grøn and Christian Kornum), Bosch & Fjord, Büro Detours, Collective Strings, Kvinder på Værtshus (”Pub Women”), Parfyme and Urban Sound Institute.

Catalogue: Kunsthal Charlottenborg has entered into a media partnership with the newspaper Politiken, which is publishing a 12-page exhibition newspaper in 16,000 copies. Here the individual groups will be presented with ample photographic material on earlier works and current pieces on show at the exhibition. The newspaper will come out on 18 June. The person in charge at Politiken is Lise Ingemand; layout is by Agnete Schepelern, and the paper has a leader by the art critic Peter Michael Hornung.

Curator: Charlotte Bagger Brandt, Råderum – office for contemporary art.

Exhibition coordinator and PR person: Helle Bøgelund

Partners: DFDS Canal Tours is offering a departure at 14.45 pm every day throughout the exhibition period in connection with the work The Other Tour by Women down the Pub. Wonderful Copenhagen is marketing Bosch & Fjords Culture Camping to tourists, and has made its hotel booking system available for reserving overnight stays at the exhibition. Pension Lysholmgård has cooperated in developing Collective Strings, in which five residents have helped the artist Karoline H. Larsen.