iARKEN Museum of Contemporary ArtIshøj
Come Hell Or High Water – SUPERFLEX
SUPERFLEX stage ARKEN as a sunken ark in blue light, with 30 years of work in crates and a working factory building an artificial reef for rising seas.
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You come in past sandbags and barricades, as if someone tried to keep the sea out and lost. Inside, ARKEN's long Art axis is lit blue, with a deep-sea soundtrack, and transport crates are piled down it like cargo in a hold. They carry SUPERFLEX's work from 1993 to now.
In the middle stands The Ark Factory: lab coats, plastic tanks, an industrial freezer and butcher's strip curtains, turning ice and cement into pink blocks. They are parts of an ark that won't float; it goes on seabeds around the world as an artificial reef. A museum whose name means "the Ark" has finally built one, and it's designed to sink.
Berlingske's Holger Dahl called it "an enchanting exhibition". Kunstkritikk's Nanna Friis found the blueness "a rather childish way of introducing an ocean theme". Leave time for the three films, about 50 minutes together, screened hourly from 11:00, Tuesday to Sunday.
Editor's pick
SUPERFLEX turn ARKEN into a sunken ark lit blue, with thirty years of their work packed in crates and a working factory building an artificial reef for rising seas. The museum sits in the Ishøj dunes, steps from the sea in question.
Look for
The Ark Factory
Look for the freezer and the butcher's strip curtains in the middle of the show, where pink reef blocks are cast from ice and cement.
The sandbagged entrance
Sandbags and barricades at the door set the premise: the sea has already got into the museum.
The crates in the Art axis
Transport crates stacked down the blue-lit gallery hold thirty years of SUPERFLEX work, staged as a ship's cargo.
All Is Water (2023)
An AI narrator wonders what fish are aware of, filmed in Corsica among Chromis chromis and floating Fish Cubes.
Two Suns (2024)
Two children talk about the Marshall Islands bomb tests and redesign a model of a concrete storage dome into a playground.
Good for
- Dates
- Going Solo
Skip if
You want activism without the stagecraft: Kunstkritikk found the blue scenery upstaging the politics.
Free in the same building
Plan a visit to ARKEN Museum of Contemporary ArtAlso at ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art
On now nearby
Image credits
5
- Come Hell Or High Water – SUPERFLEXPhoto: Anders Sune Berg / ARKEN
- Gauguin & Kihara – First ImpressionsCourtesy of Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek
- The Cabinetmakers' Autumn Exhibition: Light & FormThomas Ibsen
- Camille Henrot, Paper PlanesPhoto: David Stjernholm / Copenhagen Contemporary
- ARKEN Museum of Contemporary ArtHenry Kellner / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0