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

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• 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)
• A few days ago I attended the opening of the latest exhibition at UH42 in Copenhagen. UH42 is a creative house for young people where art, community, and experimentation come together through long-term artistic programmes and workshops. Since January, 27 young participants have been working alongside the artists Halfdan Venlov, Jules Fischer, Samara Sallam and SOFTER. Through exercises, conversations, and experiments with materials, they created new works for the house’s growing collection. What I find particularly interesting about UH42 is that the results of these programmes do not simply disappear when the workshops end. Instead, the house is gradually building a collection of artworks created through these collaborations, preserving both artistic outcomes and traces of the communities that produced them. One of the highlights is Astrid Specht Seeberg’s Reflections of the Sea (Havets spejlinger, 2025), a ceramic relief and sound work created together with participants from an earlier UH42 programme. Made from clay sourced locally in Zealand, the work evokes a submerged landscape of fish, coral-like formations, fossils, sediments, and marine life. The piece feels simultaneously ancient and alive. Looking at it, one has the impression of encountering a fragment of a seabed discovered centuries in the future. This is very much in line with Astrid Specht Seeberg’s broader artistic practice, which often explores the relationships between bodies, marine ecologies, identity, and the more-than-human world. Here these themes are intertwined with another idea: that a work of art can also become a record of collaboration. Perhaps that is what impressed me most about the exhibition. The artworks are not merely representations of a process. They are evidence that artistic practice can create new forms of attention, new relationships, and new ways of being in the world together. (05/30/2026 16:25:05)
• Last week I went to the opening of Benedikte Bjerre’s exhibition CAPITAL at Kunsthal Gl. Strand. The exhibition is curated by Mai Dengsøe, who in remarkably few years has already established herself as one of the genuinely interesting younger curators on the Danish art scene. Before this, she was among many other projects the initiators behind Bizarro, the now closed artist-driven exhibition space in Copenhagen that, for a period, managed to create exactly the kind of experimental and intellectually curious atmosphere that institutional art spaces often struggle to reproduce. I have previously had the pleasure of seeing Benedikte Bjerre’s works at Palace Enterprise, but CAPITAL feels like an expansion of her practice — both visually and conceptually. The exhibition moves in a strangely seductive space between children’s play, economic systems and ecological collapse. Chocolate coins glitter on the floor like a treasure pile from a Disney film, while at the same time referring to cocoa prices, climate change and the strange fictional nature of value itself. In the conversation between Mai Dengsøe and Benedikte Bjerre, Bjerre described money as a kind of collective hallucination: a social fiction invented to simplify exchange, but which increasingly seems detached from material reality. That double movement — between playfulness and structural critique — runs throughout the exhibition. Particularly striking was the work HOT COLD, where the repeated words along the upper walls immediately evoke the children’s game “getting warmer”. In the discussion, Bjerre connected this directly to climate instability and the strange psychological atmosphere of our moment: we are all moving through increasingly volatile systems while still speaking in the language of games and optimization. Another central work revolves around camels — referencing the Danish expression “at sluge kameler” (“to swallow camels”) and the biblical image of straining out the gnat while swallowing the camel. Here the critique becomes aimed at symbolic politics and our tendency to focus obsessively on small moral gestures while ignoring larger structural problems. Plastic straws disappear while the broader systems remain intact. It is difficult not to think about Bourdieu here. Not merely because the exhibition’s title invokes capital directly, but because the works constantly shift between economic capital, symbolic capital and cultural capital. Even the exhibition opening itself — crowded with artists, curators, collectors, writers and art world regulars — became part of the work’s ecology of value production. Who assigns value? Who legitimizes taste? What kinds of objects become worthy of contemplation? Yet what prevents the exhibition from collapsing into academic illustration is Bjerre’s humor. There is something almost absurdly elegant about transforming discount bread into bronze or turning piles of chocolate coins into meditations on planetary extraction systems. The exhibition manages something surprisingly rare: it speaks fluently in the visual language of contemporary art while still remaining genuinely readable as an experience rather than merely as theory. And perhaps that is also why the conversation between Mai Dengsøe and Benedikte Bjerre worked so well. It never felt like explanatory curatorial framing imposed onto the works. Rather, it felt like listening to two people trying to understand how artistic meaning can still circulate in an age saturated by images, commodities and attention economies. (05/26/2026 23:01:17)
• This weekend I finished the Danish version of Wolfram Eilenberger’s The Presence of Philosophy (in German: Die Gegenwart der Philosophie Ein Wegweiser) — a short but surprisingly demanding little book about why philosophy still matters in our time. Over the last years I have also read the first two books in his remarkable trilogy on twentieth century philosophy, Time of the Magicians and The Fire of Freedom. The third and final volume, Spirits of the Present, is still waiting patiently in my ever-growing book stack. The title Out of the Labyrinth comes from Borges. And the image of the labyrinth becomes the book’s central metaphor for modern existence itself: not merely complexity, but the feeling of being trapped inside systems of language, institutions, ideologies and inherited concepts that no longer help us orient ourselves in the world. Eilenberger describes philosophy not primarily as theory-building, but as a kind of diagnostic practice. Inspired by Foucault, the philosopher’s task is to ask: what exactly is our present? What is distinctive about this historical moment? And where do our inherited words and categories begin to fail us? One of the book’s key concepts is the almost untranslatable German word Geistesgegenwart, rendered in Danish as "Åndsnærværelse". “Presence of mind” is too weak. “Spiritual presence” too mystical. The German Geist simultaneously means mind, spirit, consciousness, atmosphere, wit, zeitgeist and even ghost. That ambiguity is precisely the point. For Eilenberger, philosophy begins when one senses that the available language no longer matches lived experience. When the “ready-made words” handed down by institutions, media, education or ideology suddenly feel insufficient. Philosophy then becomes an attempt to regain orientation — or perhaps simply attentiveness. There is a beautiful passage where he writes that philosophers “care for and cultivate their present.” I kept returning to that phrase while reading. Because the book’s strongest idea may not actually be that philosophy is uniquely necessary today. Every age tends to imagine itself as exceptionally crisis-ridden. Rather, the book reminds us that philosophy matters whenever societies produce too many forms of noise, abstraction, certainty and intellectual automation — and too little genuine attentiveness. And perhaps that is where Borges’ labyrinth becomes most relevant. The fear is not merely that we cannot find the exit. It is that we may spend our lives simply moving from one labyrinth into another. (05/25/2026 16:58:15)
• Yesterday the new exhibition by Danh Vo opened at Kunsthal 44Møen — and it is difficult to overstate what a remarkable achievement it is for a relatively small Danish kunsthal to host an exhibition of this calibre. Just this spring alone I encountered Danh Vo’s works in very different international contexts: at Gl. Strand in Copenhagen, represented by several of the world’s leading galleries at Art Basel Hong Kong, and again in Paris at Bourse de Commerce during the magnificent Chiaroscuro exhibition. And now, suddenly and improbably, these works — and this atmosphere — have arrived on Møn. What makes the exhibition so powerful is not simply the individual works, but the way they seem to exist between worlds: between archaeology and contemporary art, Christianity and animism, decay and rebirth, intimacy and geopolitics. Several of the works in the exhibition combine fragments of Roman and Renaissance sculpture with bronze castings, organic material, and living mushrooms. The pink oyster mushrooms slowly emerging from cracked bronze torsos and religious figures feel almost unsettling at first — as if history itself had become porous and alive again. One of the wall texts describes fungi as a life form that survives long after humans and “takes over a host system and changes it from within.” It is difficult not to read this both biologically and politically. One of the most striking works merges a Renaissance Pietà with a bronze female torso, balancing the classical Christian image of grief and compassion with fragmentation, sensuality, and doubt. Another series focuses obsessively on the hands of Michelangelo’s sculptures — David, Moses, Christ — transformed through close-up photogravure into something unexpectedly intimate, almost erotic. There are also works connected to Vietnamese history and global exchange: ceramics recovered from a shipwreck that lay on the seabed for 500 years, handwritten calligraphy by Danh Vo’s father Phung Vo, references to French missionaries in Indochina, and even walnut wood connected — through an extraordinary historical detour — to Robert McNamara and the Vietnam War. Danh Vo’s art has always had a unique ability to let apparently unrelated histories collide until hidden structures suddenly emerge between them. Empires, migration, religion, violence, colonialism, family, memory, bodies, flowers, ruins. And somehow it never feels illustrative or academic. Instead it feels strangely human. There is also something deeply moving about seeing these works on Møn, surrounded by open sky, fields, and silence rather than the usual international art fair machinery. Contemporary art of this level is often experienced in hurried fragments between airports, collector dinners, and crowded museum halls. Here there is actually time to look. And perhaps that is precisely what this exhibition deserves. (05/24/2026 19:50:20)

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