黑料不打烊

The exhibition 鈥淒rain the 脰resund鈥� brings together fourteen artists living on both sides of the 脰resund to examine the region as a site of sociocultural, ecological, technological, economic, and political entanglements. Using local and regional narratives as a starting point, the exhibition explores broader global movements and processes 鈥� migration, climate change, economic development 鈥� to uncover the connections between fact and fiction, progress and decline, the self and the world.

Explores social transformations

The exhibition presents a critical perspective on the infrastructure of the welfare state, and the greenwashing employed by commercial actors to implement profit-driven projects. Many of the artworks highlight circuits of exchange and explore the hopes and failures of mass social transformation, digging into the increasingly muddy relationships between public and private, past and present, production and destruction.

Social historical perspective

What unites the artists is their exploration of how our societal structures impact human labour, human bodies, and our lived experiences. Several of the artists work from a social-historical perspective, investigating various movements and narratives in the region, often against the backdrop of climate change and privatisation. Many of the works are rooted in true stories about the region鈥檚 transformation and history 鈥� stories that the region has embraced, exploited, or rejected. Through artistic interpretation, these stories are opened up for new interpretations of labour, ecology, migration, and class.

Drain the 脰resund!

In 1953, the Scanian industrialist Ruben Rausing made an ambitious proposal: drain the 脰resund, thereby bringing Malm枚 and Copenhagen together and providing new space for development. Rather than viewing Rausing鈥檚 statement solely as an expression of capitalist logic driven by a desire for growth, the exhibition鈥檚 curator, Post Brothers, embraces the absurdity of the statement, treating it as an artistic provocation to reconsider ideas about national borders and development. For the exhibition, the curator was deeply inspired by Jesper Meijling鈥檚 2000 text 鈥楢ll That Is Fluid Becomes Solid: Lecture on Landscape and Economy鈥�, where the researcher and architect connects Rausing鈥檚 dream of redirecting the 脰resund鈥檚 waters to the logistical thinking that characterizes his company, Tetra Pak, whose operations revolve around packaging liquid food products.

The possibilities of the borderland

Malm枚 has a strong and vibrant contemporary art scene. Drain the 脰resund looks across the strait, exploring the region鈥檚 origins and direction, as well as the connection between Malm枚 and Copenhagen. What possibilities can be found in the in-between space of this borderland? And what materials, traumas and realities lie on the seabed? The exhibition adopts an absurd yet critically pessimistic approach to inspire new reflections, drawing on Rausing鈥檚 paradoxical idea as both an exaggeration of development rhetoric and a bold reimagining of the region. The thought of draining the 脰resund is to drain it of its baggage and unearth its dark depths, uncovering what has been lost, and inspire new dreams for the region鈥檚 future.