Our first day at the Venice Biennale included visits to two national pavilions that, rather strikingly, approach the same anxiety: what happens when fewer children are born, and what does that tell us about the societies they would be born into?
At the Japanese Pavilion, Japanese-American artist Ei Arakawa-Nash has created Grass Babies, Moon Babies. Visitors are invited to pick up one of around 200 remarkably lifelike baby dolls, weighing about five kilos, and carry it through the exhibition. I am pictured here with mine. La Biennale di Venezia
It sounds almost gimmicky, but it isn't. The physical act of carrying a child changes the way one encounters the pavilion. Arakawa-Nash, who became a parent to twins in 2024, uses parenthood and care as a way into larger questions about declining birth rates, queer families, Japanese identity, war, historical responsibility and what one generation owes the next. At the end, you can even change your baby's diaper and receive a poem linked to its fictional birthday and to events in 20th-century history. La Biennale di Venezia
The Danish Pavilion addresses much the same demographic anxiety, but from a very different direction. In Maja Malou Lyse's Things to Come, pornography, sperm banks, cryogenic containers and "sperm races" form a deliberately provocative speculation about reproduction in 2045. The underlying question is whether images, including pornography, might influence fertility and perhaps even contribute to the continuation of the species. La Biennale di Venezia
Of the two, I found the Japanese pavilion by far the more interesting and intellectually challenging.
The Danish pavilion certainly provokes, but to me the provocation seemed to substitute for rather than open up an underlying idea. Perhaps that is also part of a broader tendency in very young Western contemporary art: an increasingly predictable search for transgression. At some point the escalation defeats itself. When almost nothing can shock us anymore, what remains genuinely provocative may be the artistic poverty of the provocation itself.
The Japanese pavilion did something more difficult. It began almost playfully, with the absurdity of grown adults walking around an art exhibition carrying heavy plastic babies, and ended by making care, responsibility and the future feel unexpectedly concrete.
Sometimes five kilos can be quite a lot to think about.
09/27/2026 11:44:28
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- Our first day at the Venice Biennale included visits to two national pavilions that, rather strikingly, approach the same anxiety: what happens when fewer children are born, and what does that tell us about the societies they would be born into?
At the Japanese Pavilion, Japanese-American artist Ei Arakawa-Nash has created Grass Babies, Moon Babies. Visitors are invited to pick up one of around 200 remarkably lifelike baby dolls, weighing about five kilos, and carry it through the exhibition. I am pictured here with mine. La Biennale di Venezia
It sounds almost gimmicky, but it isn't. The physical act of carrying a child changes the way one encounters the pavilion. Arakawa-Nash, who became a parent to twins in 2024, uses parenthood and care as a way into larger questions about declining birth rates, queer families, Japanese identity, war, historical responsibility and what one generation owes the next. At the end, you can even change your baby's diaper and receive a poem linked to its fictional birthday and to events in 20th-century history. La Biennale di Venezia
The Danish Pavilion addresses much the same demographic anxiety, but from a very different direction. In Maja Malou Lyse's Things to Come, pornography, sperm banks, cryogenic containers and "sperm races" form a deliberately provocative speculation about reproduction in 2045. The underlying question is whether images, including pornography, might influence fertility and perhaps even contribute to the continuation of the species. La Biennale di Venezia
Of the two, I found the Japanese pavilion by far the more interesting and intellectually challenging.
The Danish pavilion certainly provokes, but to me the provocation seemed to substitute for rather than open up an underlying idea. Perhaps that is also part of a broader tendency in very young Western contemporary art: an increasingly predictable search for transgression. At some point the escalation defeats itself. When almost nothing can shock us anymore, what remains genuinely provocative may be the artistic poverty of the provocation itself.
The Japanese pavilion did something more difficult. It began almost playfully, with the absurdity of grown adults walking around an art exhibition carrying heavy plastic babies, and ended by making care, responsibility and the future feel unexpectedly concrete.
Sometimes five kilos can be quite a lot to think about. (09/27/2026 11:44:28)
- Back in Venice. Again.
Jeanne and I are here for the 61st Venice Biennale, continuing a tradition that has brought us back more or less every other year for the past 15–16 years. Somehow, Venice and the Biennale have become intertwined for us: the city as a permanent stage, and contemporary art arriving every second year to disturb it.
This year's Biennale is titled In Minor Keys. It was conceived by the late Cameroonian-Swiss curator Koyo Kouoh, who died unexpectedly in May 2025, after she had already developed the exhibition's conceptual framework, chosen the artists and works, and shaped everything from the catalogue to the exhibition architecture. Her team subsequently completed the exhibition according to her plans. La Biennale di Venezia
And there is something unusually attractive about Kouoh's starting point. Rather than another attempt to explain the entire contemporary world through one grand curatorial argument, In Minor Keys asks us to slow down and listen to quieter frequencies: art as contemplation, memory, healing, resistance and sometimes simply enchantment. The exhibition brings together 110 participants from very different geographies, not in rigid thematic sections but through affinities, echoes and what Kouoh called a relational geography. La Biennale di Venezia
Jeanne is pictured here with the Biennale guide, In Minor Keys. The full official catalogue itself consists of two volumes and was conceived as something more than documentation: artists are given space not only for finished works but for essays, sketches, studio images and the processes behind them. It seems appropriate for an exhibition interested less in declarations than in listening. La Biennale di Venezia
As in recent years, we are staying at the Hotel Excelsior on the Lido. This year we have been upgraded to a rather wonderful room overlooking the Adriatic.
Which inevitably brings to mind Gustav von Aschenbach, arriving on the Lido in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, and even more the extraordinary visual world Luchino Visconti created from Mann's novella in his 1971 film.
Fortunately, the similarities stop at the sea view.
For the coming days our Venice will instead consist of the Arsenale, Giardini, national pavilions, exhibitions hidden in palazzi and churches, far too much walking, probably far too much art, and the occasional escape back across the lagoon to the Lido.
Perhaps that is also why we keep returning. The Biennale is never simply an exhibition. Venice becomes part of the exhibition, and after enough visits, your own memories become part of Venice. (09/27/2026 08:31:22)
- From Birmingham to Saturn, via Helsinki: Rediscovering Sun Ra
Some musical interests arrive suddenly. Others disappear for decades and then return through a rather improbable chain of accidents. Sun Ra belongs firmly in the second category for me.
A few days ago, as part of the Cinemateket Music Film Festival 2026 (https://www.dfi.dk/cinemateket/biograf/filmserier/serie/musikfilm-festivalen-2... (09/15/2026 14:18:14)
- At 9:30 on Saturday evening, LiteraturHaus on Nørrebro had turned blue.
Together with my friend Martin Malmgreen, I went to the late-night concert ACROSS the Night at ACROSS Festival. The setting was intimate, the lighting almost dreamlike, and the musicians were only a few metres away. Kaspar Vig’s light installation was an integral part of the concert, and musicians from NOVO Quartet, Paddington Trio and Simply Quartet were mixed across the programme rather than presented simply as three separate ensembles.
The programme itself was wonderfully constructed.
It began with Debussy’s Clair de Lune, the third movement of his Suite bergamasque: perhaps overly familiar music in other circumstances, but here its suspended harmonies and quiet luminosity immediately established the atmosphere of the night.
From there, almost without breaking the spell, came Karol Szymanowski’s The Fountain of Arethusa, the first of his three Mythes, Op. 30, for violin and piano. Inspired by the Greek myth of the nymph Arethusa, the music seems to shimmer and move like water. Szymanowski uses harmonics, tremolos and the high register of the violin to create an extraordinary palette of sound. The transition from Debussy’s moonlight to Szymanowski’s flowing water was one of the most beautiful moments of the evening: not really a change of world, more as if Debussy’s still nocturnal landscape had suddenly begun to move.
Then Charles Ives abruptly changed the perspective. The second movement of his Piano Trio is famously marked TSIAJ, “This Scherzo Is A Joke”. It is a mad, funny collision of American popular and college songs, quotations, polytonality and rhythmic disruption. Classical music temporarily behaving very badly, which is often when it becomes most interesting.
Caroline Shaw’s Entr’acte brought us back into another kind of strangeness. Written in 2011 after Shaw heard the Brentano Quartet play Haydn’s Op. 77 No. 2, it takes the old minuet-and-trio form and pulls it through what Shaw herself has described as a kind of musical looking glass. Familiar gestures appear, dissolve and re-form in new textures.
This led beautifully into the fourth movement, the Intermezzo, from Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 57. Its long, restrained violin line unfolds over an almost walking bass, gradually intensifying without ever losing its inward character. The transition from Shaw into Shostakovich was, for me, the other particularly inspired piece of programming: from contemporary fragments and half-remembered classical forms into something much darker, simpler and more emotionally exposed.
And then, finally, Jörg Widmann blew the doors open with 180 Beats per Minute, written for string sextet in 1993 and inspired by the techno nights of the early 1990s. Widmann builds almost the entire piece around rhythmic propulsion and variations of a single chord until the music develops into a six-part canon. Chamber music suddenly acquired the physical drive of a club. Widmann himself calls the piece essentially a celebration of rhythm, and that was exactly how it felt.
What I enjoyed almost as much as the music was seeing young musicians of this calibre rethink how classical music can be presented.
ACROSS deliberately places chamber music in an informal setting, with a bar, close physical proximity between musicians and audience, unusual programming and collaborations across ensembles. Yet nothing has been diluted to achieve accessibility. Quite the contrary. NOVO Quartet, Paddington Trio and Simply Quartet are ensembles with major international prizes and appearances at venues such as Wigmore Hall, the Elbphilharmonie and the Concertgebouw behind them. This is experimentation built on musical excellence, not instead of it.
Another Copenhagen example is Festival&Friends at KoncertKirken, also on Nørrebro. Its stated ambition is similarly to rethink what a classical music festival can be through new formats, community and a less formal relationship between musicians and audience. Its programmes mix chamber music with meditation, jazz, theatrical formats, children’s concerts and afterparties, again with exceptionally accomplished young musicians.
For years there has been anxious discussion about how classical music can find a younger audience. Perhaps part of the answer is surprisingly simple: do not make the music less demanding. Change the circumstances in which we encounter it.
Seeing musicians of this generation doing precisely that, while refusing to compromise on artistic quality, makes me rather optimistic.
Classical music does not need to be rescued from the past. It needs to be allowed to belong to the present and the future. (09/14/2026 11:26:07)
- One of the pleasures of this late summer has been spending quite a few evenings with friends at Cinemateket’s Music Film Festival in Copenhagen.
And, without really planning it, I seem to have ended up watching a small history of the music that formed me.
David Byrne’s American Utopia, filmed by Spike Lee, captures Byrne’s extraordinary Broadway production: Talking Heads songs, his solo work and a group of musicians moving freely around an almost empty stage. It is both concert and choreography, intellectually constructed and irresistibly physical.
One Hand Clapping is something quite different: Paul McCartney and Wings in Abbey Road Studios in 1974, shortly after Band on the Run, rehearsing and performing while cameras happen to be present. There is something wonderfully unpolished about seeing McCartney simply working as a musician. One of the first LPs I owned was by Paul McCartney and Wings, so some of this music reaches rather far back into my own biography.
Then there was Amazing Grace. In January 1972, Aretha Franklin returned to the gospel music of her childhood and recorded the album live over two nights in a church in Los Angeles, accompanied by Reverend James Cleveland and the Southern California Community Choir. Sydney Pollack filmed it, but technical problems meant that the footage remained unseen for decades.
It is almost overwhelming. Franklin does not merely perform gospel. For 90 minutes one understands where a very large part of soul, R&B and rock came from.
And there, rather wonderfully, is Mick Jagger in the audience, with Charlie Watts, completely absorbed by what he is hearing.
The Brazilian double bill reached even further back and sideways.
Pierre Barouh’s remarkable Saravah, filmed in Rio in 1969, wanders almost casually through Brazilian musical culture with Baden Powell as a guide, encountering figures including Pixinguinha, João da Baiana, Maria Bethânia and Paulinho da Viola. It is particularly fascinating in the way it makes the African foundations of samba and Brazilian popular music visible and audible.
Ana Rieper’s Nothing Like Before – The Music of Clube da Esquina moves forward a few years to one of my favourite musical worlds: Milton Nascimento, Lô Borges, Beto Guedes, Toninho Horta, Wagner Tiso and the extraordinary 1972 album Clube da Esquina. Milton Nascimento’s voice is the soundtrack to a considerable part of my late teenage years.
What struck me after seeing all these films is how misleading our musical categories can be.
The young musicians around Clube da Esquina adored the Beatles. Lô Borges and Beto Guedes were genuine Beatlemaniacs. Yet their music combined that influence with bossa nova, jazz, Brazilian traditions and the African and Latin American currents running through Nascimento’s music.
David Byrne and Talking Heads travelled the other way across many of the same bridges. Talking Heads drew heavily on African polyrhythms and Fela Kuti, while Byrne became an obsessive champion of Brazilian music. When he later founded Luaka Bop and compiled his Brazil Classics collections, Milton Nascimento was naturally among the artists he included.
And behind much of it lies the immense African musical diaspora: in Brazilian samba and MPB, in Fela’s Afrobeat, in American blues, soul and gospel. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones absorbed Black American music; Brazilian musicians absorbed the Beatles; Byrne absorbed both Brazil and Africa.
And in Amazing Grace, Mick Jagger is suddenly standing in a Los Angeles church in 1972, listening spellbound to Aretha Franklin take the music back towards one of its sources.
When I first heard all this music as a teenager, these were separate records sitting in different parts of the collection.
Half a century later, the connections between them seem almost more interesting than the differences.
Perhaps genres are mostly something we invented to organise record shops. Music itself has always been rather less obedient. (09/14/2026 10:51:04)
- Last week I went to AFUK on Vesterbro to see Copenhagen Opera Festival’s The Ring – Forever Hot. I went in very much disposed to like it.
I am, like so many others, a great admirer of Wagner’s operas. But certainly not because I think they should be preserved under glass. Quite the opposite.
Der Ring des Nibelungen is one of those inexhaustible works that each generation should be allowed to drag into its own time. Power, greed, love, betrayal, family, law, nature and the corruption that comes with the pursuit of absolute power hardly became obsolete with the 19th century.
The great modern productions of the Ring have demonstrated exactly this. Patrice Chéreau’s famous centenary production in Bayreuth in 1976 is perhaps the obvious example: a radical reinterpretation can reveal things in a classic rather than diminish it.
But there is also such a thing as too much interpretation.
The Ring – Forever Hot threw almost everything into the pot: circus, audience participation, inflatable fantasy creatures, sausages and sauerkraut, schlager, rock, electronic soundscapes and a general determination not to leave too many theatrical devices unused.
Some of it was amusing. Some of it was clever. Collectively, however, it became too much for me.
My objection was not that it was irreverent. Wagner can survive irreverence perfectly well. The problem was that the production seemed to confuse freedom with accumulation. At some point I felt that The Ring itself was disappearing behind all the ideas about what one might do with The Ring.
There is a difference between opening up a classic and dismantling it until almost anything can be projected onto the remaining fragments.
The singing was another matter. The principal voices were genuinely impressive, and there was very little I could find fault with vocally. At moments they cut through all the surrounding theatrical mayhem and reminded me why I had come.
Interestingly, the critics were sharply divided. Some shared something close to my exhaustion; others absolutely loved the anarchic total-theatre approach. And perhaps that disagreement tells us something important about the production.
Wagner made the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, central to his artistic programme. The paradox for me was that this particular attempt at totality ended up as accumulation: so much was added that too little space remained for Wagner.
How far can one reinterpret a great work before the interpretation itself becomes the main event? (08/25/2026 09:51:16)
- Saturday evening turned into a rather wonderful Spanish detour through Copenhagen.
Jeanne was fully occupied with running Fluid Festival, so Vilhelm was “forced” to take her place and accompany me. There are, admittedly, harder duties for a son.
We began at Hauser Bar & Vin at Hauser Plads, where Amir Kuckovic from Botiga had organised a small vermouth pop-up. Botiga specialises in bringing Catalan wines, vermouth and other products to Denmark, and among the vermouths we tasted was De Muller Iris from Reus.
Iris belongs to the old tradition of Vermut de Reus and is made from an infusion of a remarkable number of Mediterranean herbs, roots and aromatic plants. It was a useful reminder that vermouth deserves to be treated as a drink in its own right rather than merely as something sacrificed anonymously to a cocktail shaker.
From there we continued to Refshaleøen for a preview dinner at the new Spanish restaurant Hostia, organised as a Hostia × Noma Projects Taste Buds event.
The menu was unmistakably Spanish, but without feeling like an exercise in culinary nostalgia.
We began with salmorejo, followed by a gilda of anchovy, piparra and olive, then cecina, pan con tomate, sobrasada with honey and a tomato salad with yeast vinaigrette.
Then came potatoes with smoked fish, grilled portobello mushrooms with spiced butter sauce and perhaps the most emphatically Spanish dish of the evening: chuleta from an eight-year-old Rubia Gallega cow.
And then came a small detail that tied the evening together rather beautifully.
The first dessert was melon with vermouth, and the vermouth was the very same De Muller Iris that Amir had served us at the Botiga pop-up earlier in the evening. First in the glass at Hauser Bar & Vin, a few hours later returning on the plate at Hostia.
We finished with tocino de cielo, served with egg-yolk custard, cream and truffle.
The wines were equally memorable. Among them was a 2004 Viña Ardanza Reserva from La Rioja Alta, followed towards the end by Matusalem VORS from González Byass, an extraordinary old Cream Sherry aged for more than 30 years.
What I particularly liked about the evening was the relationship between tradition and experimentation.
The dishes were built around very recognisable Spanish ingredients and culinary ideas: salmorejo, gilda, cecina, sobrasada, Rubia Gallega, vermouth and sherry. Yet the meal never seemed concerned with simply recreating Spain in Copenhagen.
Instead, Spanish tradition became material for interpretation.
Perhaps that is one reason why Spanish cooking fits so well into Copenhagen’s contemporary restaurant culture. Both take ingredients and traditions seriously, but neither needs to treat tradition as something frozen in time.
And there are considerably worse ways of spending an evening with one’s son than drinking vermouth, eating Spanish food and sharing an old Rioja. (08/17/2026 18:42:34)
- There are not many reasons to look forward to the end of the summer holidays. But one of them is that, as August moves into its second half, Copenhagen’s galleries begin to wake up again.
Today I just managed to make it to the opening of Gianna Surangkanjanajai’s new exhibition at Christian Andersen Gallery. It runs from 14 August to 19 September.
Surangkanjanajai was born in Cologne in 1991 and now lives in New York. Her practice is mainly sculptural, but more broadly she seems interested in what happens when material, space and physical action are allowed to determine the form of a work, rather than simply execute an image already conceived by the artist. In recent exhibitions, liquids, industrial paint, acrylic structures, gravity and movement have all played important roles.
What caught me today, however, were the images on the walls.
At first glance, they are almost uneventful: surfaces, spaces, traces, bits of architecture or material. But something seems to have disappeared from them. They look less like photographs of something than photographs of where something has been.
The result is strangely ghostlike.
There is an obvious temptation with photography to think that its essential function is to preserve presence: this person was here, this building existed, this happened. Surangkanjanajai’s images seem to turn that logic around. What becomes visible is absence itself. You start looking for the missing object, event or person, even though you cannot know whether anything was ever really there.
That impression fits rather well with Surangkanjanajai’s wider practice. Her work repeatedly treats form as something provisional, produced by actions and forces and capable of changing again. One of her recent works is, quite literally, titled *Removed*.
Perhaps that is why these apparently very quiet images stay in the mind. They offer remarkably little, yet make you search for something that is no longer there.
A good beginning to the autumn gallery season. (08/14/2026 20:47:39)
- Jeanne and I spent part of today at Ingolfs Kaffebar on Amager celebrating the publication of a new book by a member of our extended family, Julia Maria Gieysztor Bertelsen.
Her new novel, Det Store År (The Great Year), has just been published by Tredje September.
The novel centres on Nikola, a young woman living with her husband in an old Copenhagen apartment who finds herself unable, or perhaps unwilling, to keep pace with the great ticking clock of the world. She retreats into books, hides in a wardrobe and even seeks refuge in the sewers.
But the novel does not remain there. Another strand follows Nikola’s uncle to an isolated sanatorium in the Polish mountains, where he is recovering from an illness called “Verdenssygen”, the sickness of the world. And in another time, an elderly writer appears almost as a ghost from the future.
The publisher describes the book as a modern Bildungsroman about being a woman in the 2020s: about love and difficult relationships, family histories, privilege, patriarchy, capitalism and, ultimately, the difficult business of escaping oneself.
I was very taken with Julia’s first novel, Koktebel, published in 2020. It was an unusual and experimental book, dealing among other things with tourism, exoticism and relations of power.
So I was particularly curious when I encountered an excerpt from the new work in the literary journal Trappe Tusind last year. Trappe Tusind is one of those valuable small literary journals where established and emerging writers can appear next to criticism, translation and literary scholarship.
Now the fragment has become a book.
There is something rather satisfying about first encountering a text while it is still on its way into the world, and then, some time later, standing with the completed book in your hands. And even better when the author happens to be family.
I am looking forward to seeing what happened between the fragment I read and the finished novel.
And, as the photograph shows, Julia was already at work turning copies into individual objects through the ancient analogue technology known as handwriting. (08/14/2026 20:27:24)
- A week on Bornholm turned out to contain rather more than sea, rocks and long walks.
Jeanne and I spent a wonderfully slow week on Denmark’s “Sunshine Island” in the second half of July, visiting friends in different parts of Bornholm and spending as much time as possible outdoors.
Bornholm remains one of those rather extraordinary parts of Denmark where the landscape seems to have forgotten that Denmark is supposed to be flat. Granite cliffs, forests and the Baltic Sea make it feel quite unlike almost anywhere else in the country.
One of our walks took us to Randkløve Skår, one of Bornholm’s most remarkable geological formations: a narrow fissure cutting some 14 metres down through the granite towards the sea. It is an impressive place, but also strangely peaceful once you have climbed around the rocks and simply sit looking out over the Baltic.
And then there was the music.
At Gæstgiveren in Allinge we managed to catch APHACA in concert. Apparently, they are currently one of Denmark’s most successful young bands, with a sold-out Parken concert ahead of them later this year.
This information had somehow completely escaped me.
I may actually have been the only person at Gæstgiveren who had never knowingly heard an APHACA song before, let alone knew who they were. The rest of the audience certainly seemed considerably better informed.
There is something rather enjoyable about discovering music that way. No reviews, no Spotify recommendation, no algorithm telling you that because you listened to X, you will probably enjoy Y. You simply stand in a crowded garden on Bornholm while four young musicians start playing and discover for yourself why everybody else appears to know the words.
I liked them.
Perhaps ignorance is occasionally an underrated way of discovering things. (08/09/2026 21:08:41)