Yesterday was Constitution Day in Denmark.
For most Danes, 5 June is associated with the signing of the Danish Constitution in 1849 and the democratic traditions that followed. It is one of the few national days that still carries a certain civic weight.
It is also Father’s Day.
I have always had mixed feelings about Father’s Day. Like so many modern commemorative days, it often feels more like a marketing exercise than a genuine tradition—a reminder to consume rather than remember.
But 5 June has a very real meaning for me.
It is my father Jakob H. Grønbæk’s birthday.
My father died eight years ago at the age of 92. Yesterday, however, we celebrated what would have been his 100th birthday.
We gathered at the grave of my parents at Allerslev Church: my brother and me, our three sons, my cousin Jesper, our better halves, and a number of close friends.
Standing there, I was struck by how quickly a century can pass. A hundred years sounds impossibly long when viewed from one end, and remarkably brief when viewed from the other.
A birthday celebration at a graveyard may sound sombre. It was not.
It was filled with stories, laughter, memories, and the quiet recognition that a life continues to echo through children, grandchildren, relatives, friendships, and shared experiences.
Constitution Day is, in a sense, also about continuity between generations. Democracies survive because each generation receives something from those who came before and passes it on again.
The same is true of families.
Yesterday we celebrated both.
06/06/2026 16:26:22
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- Yesterday was Constitution Day in Denmark.
For most Danes, 5 June is associated with the signing of the Danish Constitution in 1849 and the democratic traditions that followed. It is one of the few national days that still carries a certain civic weight.
It is also Father’s Day.
I have always had mixed feelings about Father’s Day. Like so many modern commemorative days, it often feels more like a marketing exercise than a genuine tradition—a reminder to consume rather than remember.
But 5 June has a very real meaning for me.
It is my father Jakob H. Grønbæk’s birthday.
My father died eight years ago at the age of 92. Yesterday, however, we celebrated what would have been his 100th birthday.
We gathered at the grave of my parents at Allerslev Church: my brother and me, our three sons, my cousin Jesper, our better halves, and a number of close friends.
Standing there, I was struck by how quickly a century can pass. A hundred years sounds impossibly long when viewed from one end, and remarkably brief when viewed from the other.
A birthday celebration at a graveyard may sound sombre. It was not.
It was filled with stories, laughter, memories, and the quiet recognition that a life continues to echo through children, grandchildren, relatives, friendships, and shared experiences.
Constitution Day is, in a sense, also about continuity between generations. Democracies survive because each generation receives something from those who came before and passes it on again.
The same is true of families.
Yesterday we celebrated both. (06/06/2026 16:26:22)
- This time of year in Copenhagen means one thing: Distortion.
I have had the privilege of following the festival from unusually close quarters for more than a decade. For the past ten years, I have served on the board of the Distortion Foundation. This year, I stepped down to make room for new forces and new perspectives. Fortunately, I still have the pleasure of remaining involved through the festival’s advisory board.
Distortion is one of those rare cultural institutions that feels impossible and inevitable at the same time. Impossible because no sensible person would design a festival that attempts to transform an entire city into a temporary laboratory for music, art, urban life, and organized unpredictability. Inevitable because once you have experienced it, Copenhagen without Distortion becomes difficult to imagine.
Much of the credit belongs to Thomas Fleurquin, whose energy and persistence have carried the project through more than two decades of growth, experimentation, crises, and reinvention. It was a pleasure to catch up with him again at this year’s opening.
The 2026 Opening Ceremony at Kongens Nytorv once again demonstrated why Distortion remains unique. This year’s concept, Live Mixtape, brought together artists performing simultaneously across multiple stages, creating a single continuous performance assembled in real time. A kind of urban composition where post-club music, choirs, percussion ensembles, electronic sounds, and pop collided and merged.
Distortion has long described this approach as “Orchestrated Chaos”—a phrase first coined around earlier iterations of the concept. It remains one of the best descriptions I know of both the festival and, perhaps, contemporary city life itself.
The remarkable thing is that what could easily descend into confusion instead becomes something larger than the sum of its parts. Thousands of people gathered in the middle of the city, not merely consuming culture but becoming part of it.
For a brief moment, Kongens Nytorv felt less like a square and more like a living instrument.
And every year I leave wondering the same thing: how can they possibly top this next year? (06/06/2026 16:14:50)
- A lovely start to a summer Saturday in Copenhagen.
Together with good friends, I joined “GÅ’lovsdag” — a free 50 km walk from Kongens Nytorv to Kulturværftet in Helsingør, organised by En GÅtur langs kysten.
The idea is simple and generous: everyone can join, everyone walks at their own pace, and you decide yourself how far your legs and feet are willing to negotiate.
I managed the first 10 km from Kongens Nytorv to Hellerup. The others continued another 40 km to Helsingør. I had a more bourgeois excuse: I had to get home for a wine tasting.
Still, there is something wonderful about seeing perhaps a thousand people gather early in the morning simply to walk along the coast together.
A city becomes different when experienced at walking speed. (06/06/2026 15:57:41)
- Sometimes an exhibition reminds you as much of what an artist does best as of what they are trying to do now.
Last Friday, I visited Moonwalk, Tal R’s new exhibition at Gl. Holtegaard, which has finally reopened after a major renovation.
The reopening itself is wonderful news. Gl. Holtegaard remains one of Denmark’s most beautiful exhibition spaces, and it was a pleasure to see the old buildings filled with art and people again.
Tal R is one of the defining Danish artists of his generation. His colourful, playful and deeply personal visual language is instantly recognisable.
This exhibition focuses primarily on sculpture and three-dimensional works. There are bronze figures, assembled objects, ceramics, papier-mâché constructions and all manner of strange creatures inhabiting the rooms.
Yet I have to admit that this was not one of my favourite exhibitions of the spring.
A recent review argued that the exhibition misses the presence of Tal R’s paintings and drawings, and I found myself recognising some of that criticism. The sculptures often felt like fragments of a larger universe whose centre of gravity was elsewhere.
Ironically, my favourite works were the paintings displayed in the side building.
Standing before them, I was reminded why Tal R’s work has had such a lasting impact. The paintings seemed to contain all the humour, mystery, colour and narrative richness that first made me fall in love with his art.
Still, seeing Gl. Holtegaard alive again is reason enough to make the trip. (06/05/2026 20:45:54)
- Last night week and I went to see DSCH, the remarkable theatre concert by the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra at the Royal Danish Theatre.
The title refers to Shostakovich’s musical signature: D–E♭–C–B in German notation (DSCH), a motif that became both a personal trademark and, in many ways, a coded assertion of individuality within the Soviet system.
Few composers fascinate me as much as Dmitri Shostakovich. Not only because of the music itself, but because of the role he occupied: celebrated artist, suspected dissident, loyal Soviet citizen, reluctant propagandist, survivor. His life remains one of the twentieth century’s great studies in the complicated relationship between art and power.
The concept behind DSCH is deceptively simple. The musicians do not merely perform Shostakovich’s music. They inhabit it. Playing from memory, moving across the stage, masked, choreographed, and immersed in a visual universe that is at times playful, unsettling, absurd, and deeply moving, the orchestra transforms the concert into something between theatre, dance, and ritual. The result is less a biography than a portrait of a state of mind.
The Norwegian Chamber Orchestra played Shostakovich’s greatest hits with extraordinary precision and energy. Yet my personal highlight came at the very end: the Chamber Symphony in C Minor, Op. 110a.
Originally arranged by Rudolf Barshai from Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet, the work is often understood as one of the composer’s most personal statements. It is saturated with quotations from his own music and built around the DSCH motif itself. Listening to it after ninety minutes of musical fragments felt almost like watching a life flash before one’s eyes. Themes, memories, anxieties, triumphs and defeats returned one final time, gathered into a single work of devastating intensity.
Some hear the piece as a memorial to the victims of war. Others as a musical self-portrait. Perhaps it is both. What is certain is that it demonstrates something Shostakovich understood better than most composers: that a few recurring notes can contain an entire life. (06/05/2026 20:18:47)
- Some books are difficult because they are complex. Others are difficult because they insist on returning, again and again, to the same insight from different angles.
Martin Buber’s I and Thou (Jeg og Du in this Danish edition) belongs firmly in the second category.
The book revolves around what Buber calls two “primary words” or word-pairs: I–Thou and I–It.
When we say I–It, we encounter the world as objects. We observe, analyse, classify, measure, compare, and use. Science, administration, commerce, and much of everyday life depend on this mode of engagement.
When we say I–Thou, something different happens. The other is no longer an object but a presence. A person is not reduced to a collection of characteristics, functions, or utilities. We meet them as a whole. For Buber, the same possibility extends beyond human beings: to nature, art, and ultimately to God, whom he describes as the “Eternal Thou”.
It is an inspiring vision. It is also, at least for ordinary mortals, a rather demanding one.
A life lived entirely in the mode of I–Thou seems less like a practical possibility than a spiritual ideal. Most of us spend most of our days navigating a world of I–It relations. We answer emails, review contracts, buy groceries, board trains, and attend meetings. The world simply could not function otherwise.
To Buber’s credit, he appears to recognise this in the later parts of the book. The world of I–It is not evil or false. It is necessary. The problem arises only when it becomes the whole of reality. The task is therefore not to abolish I–It, but to ensure that it does not crowd out those rarer moments in which we genuinely encounter another person—or perhaps the world itself—as a Thou.
That strikes me as a valuable insight.
My reservation is literary rather than philosophical. I confess that I felt I had grasped Buber’s central point fairly early on. What follows often reads less like a sustained argument and more like a series of variations on a theme. The repetition is undoubtedly intentional, almost liturgical in character, but I found it at times more wearing than illuminating.
Still, nearly a century after its publication, I and Thou remains one of the classic attempts to remind us that human life cannot be reduced to information, utility, and function.
The question it leaves behind is a good one:
How much of our lives are spent saying “I–It”, and how often do we truly say “I–Thou”? (06/05/2026 19:59:00)
- I have fallen down the Walter Benjamin rabbit hole. I now see him everywhere: in stray references to critical theory, in debates over technology and mass culture, and in almost any serious attempt to think the twentieth and twenty‑first centuries philosophically.
I have read a number of his shorter works, but I have to admit that Benjamin is hard to read on his own terms. Too often I find myself retreating to secondary literature—especially Wolfram Eilenberger’s books on modern philosophy, and most recently Peter E. Gordon’s short but very insightful *The Pearl Diver*.
Gordon’s book does not try to domesticate Benjamin or smooth away the difficulty. Instead, it offers a kind of guided descent: it shows how Benjamin’s thought holds together without pretending that it ever fully settles.
To me, among many others, two strands in particular stand out: Benjamin’s idea that “criticism is nothing but the artwork’s self‑realisation,” and the emblematic role of Paul Klee’s *Angelus Novus* for his philosophy of history.
Benjamin’s claim that criticism is the artwork’s self‑realisation cuts against the familiar opposition between “creative” work and “mere” commentary. For Benjamin, a serious critical reading does not stand outside the work, judging it from some neutral vantage point; it is an immanent unfolding of the work’s own inner possibilities. Criticism, at its best, is the work thinking itself further.
Gordon traces this back to Benjamin’s early reflections on Romanticism and to his lifelong suspicion of biographical or psychological approaches that reduce the artwork to the author’s life. The task is not to explain the work away, but to let it speak more fully—to bring out the constellation of meanings that are already latent in it.
This has important consequences for how we understand Benjamin’s own essays and fragments. They are not secondary to literature, theology, or philosophy; they are experiments in making works—and, in a sense, history itself—realise themselves.
Gordon is particularly good at showing how Benjamin’s often aphoristic style is not an affectation but a method: each miniature, each citation, is a way of forcing a text or an image to disclose another layer of significance.
The same logic of “self‑realisation through criticism” is at work in Benjamin’s engagement with Paul Klee’s *Angelus Novus*, the painting that became the most famous visual cipher of his thought.
In Benjamin’s hands, Klee’s enigmatic angel becomes the “angel of history”: blown irresistibly into the future with his face turned toward the past, where he sees not a chain of events but one single catastrophe piling wreckage upon wreckage. We call this catastrophe “progress.”
Here too, criticism is not external description. Benjamin’s reading of *Angelus Novus* realises a possibility in the painting that is not simply “there” for any viewer to see, but that also does not feel arbitrary once it has been articulated.
Gordon shows how this image condenses Benjamin’s idiosyncratic Marxism, his theology of messianic interruption, and his acute sensitivity to the violence that underwrites modern “advances.” The angel becomes a figure through which history itself becomes legible to us differently. The commentary changes how we see both the painting and the century it silently contemplates.
What I found especially valuable in *The Pearl Diver* is how Gordon situates these motifs within Benjamin’s broader cultural criticism without flattening their strangeness. Benjamin appears not as a system‑builder but as a thinker for whom philosophy, literature, theology, and visual art constantly refract one another.
Gordon writes with a clarity that feels almost like an act of hospitality. For readers like me, who are drawn to Benjamin but repeatedly bounce off the density of the original texts, this book provides a way back in without turning Benjamin into something easy or familiar.
In the end, *The Pearl Diver* deepened my sense of why Benjamin continues to matter today. His vision of criticism as the artwork’s self‑realisation invites us to treat our own acts of reading, viewing, and thinking as serious interventions in the life of culture—not as footnotes to a finished canon.
And his meditation on *Angelus Novus* reminds us that any account of modernity worthy of the name must hold together catastrophe and hope, wreckage and the faint possibility of redemption.
Gordon manages to present these themes in a compact, highly readable form, making this book an excellent companion for anyone who, like me, has already fallen into the Benjamin rabbit hole and is still trying to find their way through its branching tunnels. (05/30/2026 18:48:50)
- On Thursday I briefly stopped by Afgang 2026, the annual graduation exhibition at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, presented at Kunsthal Charlottenborg.
The exhibition brings together 27 graduating artists working across painting, sculpture, photography, video, sound, performance, and installation. This year’s curatorial text revolves around the image of the firefly: something fleeting that only reveals itself to those willing to slow down, allow their eyes to adjust, and pay attention to what flickers at the edge of perception.
Sometimes exhibition themes can feel a little overdetermined when one reads the catalogue. This time, however, I never really got around to testing the curators’ thesis.
I was in a hurry.
And that turned out to be interesting in its own way.
We often owe artworks our time. Most exhibitions deserve to be experienced slowly. But occasionally it is also revealing to move quickly through a show and simply notice what immediately catches one’s attention.
Among the works that stopped me were Magnus Fisker’s layered paintings, where forests, memory, and abstraction seem to dissolve into one another. Looking closely, branches, leaves, and flashes of light emerge and disappear again, as though the image is constantly being repainted by memory itself.
Nearby, Agnes Karl-Äxman’s paintings hovered between abstraction and figuration. Thin luminous layers drifted across darker passages, creating works that felt suspended between emergence and disappearance.
A large painting by Sidsel Winther drew me in through its warm, almost volcanic palette. Its flowing forms seemed to suggest both bodies and landscapes without fully settling into either.
And then there was a fragile sculptural work whose cracked surface and exposed edges appeared to preserve a fleeting trace of touch, time, and transformation.
Perhaps that is where the curators’ firefly metaphor finally caught up with me. Not through careful reading, but through a handful of works that briefly flashed in the crowd and demanded attention.
I will need to return and spend more time with the rest. (05/30/2026 18:18:36)
- Next week is the last chance to experience Mette Winckelmann’s exhibition SLIP at Wilson Saplana Gallery.
One of the things I appreciate about Wilson Saplana is that there is a remarkable consistency to the quality of what appears both on the walls and on the floor. The programme feels carefully built rather than merely scheduled. This exhibition is no exception.
In SLIP, Winckelmann continues her long investigation of geometry, textiles, patterns, memory, and materiality. The exhibition brings together painting and textile works in a way that challenges some of the old hierarchies between so-called fine art and craft traditions. The title itself refers to a movement of yielding, losing control, or allowing something to shift position — physically as well as mentally.
The painting in the photo captures much of what makes the exhibition compelling. At first glance it appears rigorously geometric, almost architectural. But the longer one looks, the more unstable it becomes. Layers of triangles, grids, textiles, traces, and textures interfere with one another. The surface seems simultaneously constructed and eroded, precise and vulnerable. It feels less like a fixed composition than a memory of one.
What I particularly enjoy in Winckelmann’s works is how abstraction never becomes sterile. Beneath the geometry there is always something bodily, domestic, and lived. The paintings carry the feeling of materials that have histories before entering the canvas.
The exhibition closes next week, so this is genuinely the last opportunity to see it. (05/30/2026 16:52:02)
- A few days ago I attended the opening of the latest exhibition at UH42.
Among the newly commissioned works was Remarkable Dreamers, a digital game created together with the artist Ida Lissner and participants from the spring 2026 programme. Entering the installation felt a little like descending below the reach of sunlight. The room was immersed in deep blue light, while strange luminous creatures drifted through an underwater landscape suspended somewhere between biology, mythology and science fiction.
The accompanying text describes Remarkable Dreamers as a deep-sea universe existing in the borderland between fact and fiction, between the familiar and the unfamiliar. It invites visitors to encounter beings that are normally inaccessible to us and to enter what the participants call a digital no-man’s-land between worlds.
What struck me most was a handwritten text displayed alongside the work. One passage reads:
“For us to meet, one of us must be dead.
For us to meet, we must be dead to each other’s recognisability.”
The lines suggest that genuine encounters require us to abandon some of our assumptions about ourselves and others. To meet something truly different, we may first have to let go of our need to recognise it in familiar terms.
Unexpectedly, the work made me think of SUPERFLEX’s Vertical Migration, currently on view in their exhibition Come Hell or High Water. The two works are very different, yet they share a fascination with life beyond the human perspective. Both invite us to imagine worlds where humans are not the protagonists and where other forms of life, intelligence and perception occupy centre stage.
I have had the privilege of working with SUPERFLEX on various projects over many years, which perhaps explains why the connection immediately came to mind. Yet what delighted me was not the similarity itself, but where it emerged.
Here were young people, most of them without formal artistic training, arriving independently at questions remarkably close to those explored by one of Denmark’s most internationally recognised contemporary art collectives.
Not only an interspecies dialogue.
An intergenerational dialogue as well.
And perhaps that is one of the most encouraging things about places like UH42. They remind us that the important conversations in contemporary art are not confined to museums, biennials or art academies. They are already taking place among the next generation. (05/30/2026 16:41:10)