21 DAYS - 21 YEARS

For three weeks in March OVERGADEN – Institute of Contemporary Art in Copenhagen will light a fire under the Danish art scene with the festival 21 Days – 21 Years.

The festival, which takes place from 5 through 25 March 2007, marks OVERGADEN’s 21 year history with a programme lasting 21 days. OVERGADEN will be hosting a series of different events such as artist talks with Joachim Koester, Annika Eriksson and Simon Starling, book and beer launch by Superflex, lectures by Alex Farquharson and Nina Möntmann, art for children and adults with Akassen and Simone Aaberg Kærn & Suzette Gemzøe, theatre with BankMalbekRau, food by artist group La Loko as well as several public debates and discussions.

Central to 21 Days – 21 Years is a presentation of OVERGADEN’s unique history as one of Copenhagen’s most experimental exhibition spaces for Danish and international contemporary art. Since it was founded in 1986, OVERGADEN has not only showed the way for young, experimental art but has also contributed to creating debate and dialogue about art today.

OVERGADEN has invited the Danish artist Kristina Ask to search the archives and stage this 21 year history and the exhibition space’s crucial role on the Danish art scene.

During the festival OVERGADEN will collaborate with the artist-run TV station tv-tv who will be setting up a studio at OVERGADEN, and with the arts portal aarhus.nu who will update daily with interviews and reports on their website. Students from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen will set up and run a bar, thereby creating a meeting place in OVERGADEN’s characteristic rooms by Christianshavn’s Canal.

21 Days – 21 Years marks the transition for OVERGADEN from being an artist-run exhibition space to an art institution with a full-time director with a curatorial background. At this special time in the history of the place, OVERGADEN is not only putting itself and its own role as a non-profit exhibition space on the agenda, but also focussing on art institutions’ responsibilities and possibilities today seen in a national as well as international perspective. To this end we have invited a number of leading artists, critics and curators who will contribute to the debate surrounding the relationship between art and its institutions. Participants include Emily Pethick (Casco – Office for Art , Design and Theory, Utrecht), Kristoffer Akselbo (artist, Copenhagen), Nav Haq (Gasworks, London), Tone O. Nielsen (curator, Copenhagen Vanessa Joan Müller (Düsseldorf Kunstverein, European Kunsthalle), Nicolai Wallner (gallerist, Copenhagen) and artists and curators from Signal (artist-run space, Malmö).

21 Days – 21 Years is a visionary suggestion of how to challenge and expand the framework of an art institution.

OVERGADEN hereby welcomes the press and the public to an extraordinary cultural event with a long series of free events that are all open to the public.

Come inside and be informed, provoked and join the debate!

21 DAYS - 21 YEARS

mit Joachim Koester, Annika Eriksson, Simon Starling, Superflex , Alex Farquharson, Nina Möntmann, Simone Aaberg Kaern, Suzette Gemzoe, Bank Malbek Rau, La Loko  ...