One Image by Nina Strand:

A man falls on the pavement, repeatedly.. In slow motion, he falls over again and again. The scene is from the film Changes by Kåre Frang, made for AFGANG 2020, an exhibition of works by graduates from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts shown at Kunsthall Charlottenborg in Copenhagen. The film was displayed together with three large ceramic sculptures inspired by traditional maternity pots from the 1800s. According to Helga Just Christoffersen, who wrote the text for the show, these works can be read in relation to our welfare state and care systems, but also to the artist’s own experiences dealing with chronic pain and parenthood. In the film As we speak, made the same year, a man falls while trying to cross a street, unsuccessfully.

A still from the latest film was offered by Frang for the charity art sale supporting Black Lives Matter and Together We Push, an event initiated by Melanie Kitti and Kinga Bartis. Seventy-three established and newly established international and Danish artists donated a work on paper that sold for 500 DKK. All income was given to these organisations. Ever since the brutal murder of George Floyd this June, and the following revolution for Black Lives Matter, protests have been held all over the western world. It is timely for Scandinavian countries to look more closely at their own history of colonialism.

Artists Kitti and Bartis invited their peers to donate work for this cause following recent events at art academies in Oslo and Copenhagen relating to racism. As Kitti explained to me, they felt they needed to ‘do something’ after watching how the newly ignited debate on racism was treated in the media. There are different ways to participate in decolonizing the art scene, Kitti explains. ‘One can make art reflecting on political questions, or be aware of representation when programming for an institution. The benefit sale was just one way of helping.’

Another artist included in the benefit art sale was Clara Hausmann, who showed an untitled work in progress. Here, she laser-jet printed a selection of photographs of roofs on ready made envelopes. As she wrote to me, she liked the lines showing how the envelope was folded underneath the image, as well as the construction and de/constructing of the envelope as an object. Leaving them open and empty, closing and opening them again, she sent them by mail, finding them to be both playful and symbolic. While Hausmman’s work was not made with the current situation as a fulcrum, it makes a comment on an old form of communication and, according to Hausmann, the necessity of being in touch in a playful way. Frang’s film depicts the feeling of never getting anywhere. Both seem needed in these days of isolation.

Clara Hausmann, untitled, 2020. — Clara Hausmann, *untitled*, 2020.