Culture
Nordic Art & Contemporary Perspectives at the ARKEN MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART - Highlights
In this episode, Marie Knipper, director of the ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, shares insights on the transformative power of contemporary art and its role in fostering reflection and imagination i...
Nordic Art & Contemporary Perspectives at the ARKEN MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART - Highlights
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You're listening to Highlights from the Creative Processes interview with director of the Aachen Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark, Marie Knipper. This podcast is supported by the Jan Michielski Foundation. I think for me, it's this awe that I have every time I meet an artist who has the courage to deal with what it means to be in the world as a human being and to tackle from different ways, through different media. I always feel that through the collaborations I have with artists, I learn a little bit more about the world, about myself, about my feelings or emotions, or how I reflect about things. Getting another person's perspective, taking that in, I think it's extremely generous, actually, what we can take with us from the artistic practices that we meet. And again, I think one of the fundamental importance about art is that it's not a place where we need to agree or find consensus or have rules. It's a place where we can speculate, where we can imagine and hopefully recourage ourselves in a way, if that's a word. But yeah, I'm always motivated by working with artists. It's that personal meat that's always extremely fruitful. We don't need to find an end solution, but it's a space where we can speculate, we can imagine, we can practice our foresight. We can be part of a bigger collective imagination together with an institutional framework, which is really what we try to motivate as well. When we communicate these exhibitions to our audience and speak with our guests about these works, we can also sense that it's really a place where a lot of people like to enter these days. You know, when you turn on the TV or look at a newspaper, listen to your radio and speak with your friends, it seems like the world is falling apart on so many levels. It's such a challenging time. So I think we can also offer this space for reflection, but also hopefully a reflection that gives some idea or some feeling of agency. So I think we can really give that space to our audiences by showing some of these groundbreaking practices that are out there right now in contemporary art. So I think I kind of got this first encounter with an institution that was really trying to rethink itself, that were trying to. Trying to work with the new agendas within contemporary art, the new formats that were also trying to speak to audiences in a new way and kind of, in a way reform the way institutions had been working before. So it was also this kind of progression in terms of myself as a professional person stepping into manager roles and taking on leadership of an institution. And at a point, after about 10 years, I had the wish to also get a more international perspective on the institutional workings. So I started at Tate Liverpool, first as senior curator and after that as interim artistic director. And it was extremely important for me also to have that international outlook, of course, but also to investigate the practices outside of Denmark. And we were very much engaged with this experience, part of going to a museum. So I think I also came and brought this maybe a bit Scandinavian, maybe a bit, you know, different way of thinking, engagement, which is for me something you do by community work, by outreach, but also by the way you do your hospitality in an institution. So an old industrial area of Copenhagen. And for me that was a fantastic opportunity because I think what I also came to realize at the time, my big motivation for my work is trying to add to the innovation of institutions, of artistical practices. It's to push the boundaries of the institution, to either be the one who can initiate or to contribute to a development in terms of trying out new ideas, to try to be a relevant institution in today's world. So. So we needed to figure out, how do we do this with this small team that we had, we had to figure out the finances. We were not state funded or funded by the municipality, as many institutions in Denmark are. So there was also this entire new way of thinking, of financial structure. And also how did we want to engage with the audience and the communities, because we were in a. And that kind of dynamic, that agility that we had at Copenhagen Contemporary, I think was extremely exciting and also for the audience, because I think that if you as an institution have that courage and that nerve, I think it really kind of rubs off on the experience you give the audience. I think one of my mottos after this experience is, you know, don't waste a good crisis, because of course there's a lot of challenges, ideas. Marguerite's exhibition is the last in a theology that we initiated in 23, which we call Nature Future. And it was based on the idea of letting artists investigate this relationship between man, nature and technology, which it's been quite important for the past three years to open up the institution to make a clear signal to the world around us that Arin, we welcome everyone who wants to visit because we really want to show. Show that the museum can be the framework for multiple experiences. And again, we're located in this beautiful natural area. It's really like a dedicated decision to go to Aachen. So it's imperative for us to open the doors up even wider and also show that this museum can host multiple experiences and to be honest, it's a cultural construction. And today working with contemporary art, I'm every day presented with how closely contemporary art is working with other creative areas. There's cross disciplinarity and beautiful. And artists today are more are cross disciplinary in the sense that if you ask are you a painter or a sculptor? They will say yes. But if we can be a place where people also come to enjoy themselves, to meet, to have conversations, to have a drink, to, to listen to some music, that's absolutely fine. Openings where everybody was welcome. We had some DJs to also of course to create a party again, hospitality. And we had about 3,000 people for our first big opening. And the most fantastic thing was that I. I was in one of the spaces that evening and I looked around and I didn't know one single person. I had this mother writing to me the day after that. Her 15 year old son was there, had been there with his friends and now he came home and he wanted to bring his parents and his friends to show the museum. So he became an ambassador by being at our opening one night. Maybe he didn't see all the art and it doesn't matter, but he wanted to come back so that this pride that he came home with being. I visited Aachen. It was great, it was cool. Everybody was looking to New York, to London, to Paris. Somewhere outside of Denmark. Every museum had to have a Rauschenberg if they had a modern collection or and Andy Warhol, this type of mimicking of the great international museums. Also at that time a lot of new museums were being built. You had the Tate Modern, Bilbao before that. There was also these very kind of flagship museums really kind of profiling the institutional world. There's this high quality of life work, life balance. You know, we have an international attraction. Our food scene has been for years had extreme international attention. And I think that's finding its way to the arts as well. Visual arts, where we have a flourishing artistic community, at least in Denmark. But what they really want to see is where's the local art, where's the Danish talents, where's the Nordic talents? What are artists interested in in your region? So we can also sense actually an institutional urgency in bringing forth all of these fantastic artists that. That come out of the Nordic region in these years. I think that is something that we need to value, we need to nurture because we see in Western democracies elsewhere that this is being challenged where the governments are to a higher and higher degree interested in the programming of institutions. In the artistic freedom. So we initiated a collaboration with the Smithsonian last year on this project called Future Worlds, which is about engaging young people in working with artists who are engaged with nature in one way or the other in their practices. Because a survey shows that about a bit over 30% of both actual Danish and American teenagers have a hard time envisioning a positive future. Yeah, because what is important to remember when you think about the works, big immersive, you know, beautiful light installations of James Drell and Douglas Wheeler and so on, they come from a time in the 60s where a little similar as to where we now. You had political revolts, you had wars going on the other end of the world from a US perspective, you had technology booming. So a lot of things, it was really also a tumultuous world where things were changing quite rapidly. Groundedness in a world that is so challenging and filled with crisis as the one we're in now, I think those types of work can give you that bodily based experience where you also enter a space that lies beyond the actual reality. Think of Malevich, who under the Russian Revolution in 1917 was painting his abstract paintings of black on black. He was sitting there with this war around him and he just escaped into this minimalistic abstract reality. And I think it can also be an expression or a consequence of a world that is extremely hard to be in and to deal with, where impulses are coming to you every day. It's so interesting to having this young artist from Kuwait who really kind of experienced the transition from the traditional Kuwaitian society, you can say, and then to the discovery of oil. Of course, not herself, she's too young, but from her parents generation. It was an extreme discovery that changed the entire society of a region and a country. And Moniya says, I'm a post oil baby. She's not post Internet, that doesn't matter anymore. But she's post oil. It's the way we refine the oil. It has invaded our bodies and everything we use and wear. So it's almost like a pandemic. Something that has really affected us all without us really noticing it. Maybe if we weren't in these countries where this extreme wealth all of a sudden came to everyone. And she does it in an interesting, intelligent way where she creates these beautiful, very alluring works that looks like, you know, big balloons and pop artish sculptures, but it's all molecules from the oil that she blows up or it's these drill heads that she turns into these beautiful sculptures. That's a great question. Well, I hope that young people can use Again, as I said, let's not waste a good crisis that the crisis we're in globally today. They somewhere can find a motivation to say, well then we'll do it in a different way that they can insist on the imagination of the freedom of thought and artistic freedom to use that to move society in a better direction. And it's not necessarily forward. I think that's also something I wanted them to reflect about. Maybe we need to go a little bit backward or sideways to find what is the future good solutions for society and for us humans. So I hope they will dare to experiment and also be able to forgive the mistakes that will be made and hopefully mend the polarization that I forgettably see happening today. We hope you've enjoyed listening to these highlights. To listen to the latest episodes or learn more about participating in exhibitions or interviews, click on subscribe. Thank you for listening.
Topics Covered
Marie Knipper
Aachen Museum of Contemporary Art
contemporary art
artist collaborations
institutional innovation
audience engagement
cross-disciplinary art
cultural construction
community outreach
Future Worlds project
Nordic talents
artistic freedom
reflection in art
youth engagement in art
cultural experiences
artistic practices