The Undergang Armchair

After a longer pause we are back with a fantastic conversation the artist Nathan Gulick, visiting town from LA for his solo show, Waiting Room, at C4 Projects. We met and had a live recording at C4, and it was both a lot of fun and very interesting. Nathan is eloquent and engaged, and we got a great podcast out of it. Please enjoy and be sure to check out the installation images from the exhibition.

And we are back! Thanks for hanging in there. Today we have a conversation we’ve been really excited to share with you, with the artist FOS, also known by his government name of Thomas Poulsen. This talk was recorded during the summer when he had a quite ambitious show up at Gallery Nils Stærk here in Copenhagen, and it turned out to be a really fun one. He is one of the guest who was both really easy and really interesting to speak with, and this is a great combination when you are talking about very engaging and expansive exhibition to begin with. We had a good long talk about many subjects, please enjoy.

The warm months have fully settled upon the land, and with every Danish summer comes the yearly tradition of Roskilde Festival, one of the world’s largest music festivals. Around 130,000 people attend the festival, which is run by a non-profit organization. For many years now they have also had a surprisingly ambitious art zone during the festival, with running themes and critical commentary on social and political issues. This year, for example they built four one-to-one replicas of the proposed wall types for the donald’s anti-cooties barrier between Mexico and the US. We spoke with the head curator, Mette Woller, and three of the exhibiting artists, Jillian Mayer, Oskar Koliander, and previous guest of the program, Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen. It was nice to see a large festival working on promoting critical and contemporary art, and we are already looking forward to next years program. This episode is brought to you in collaboration with the Artland App. Please visit artlandapp.com for more information

We have Signe Vad on the show today, which is very exciting, and has been a long time coming. She is an exceptionally hard working artist, with tons of projects always in the works as well has her own production, and she somehow gets it all done. She is a serial collaborator, exhibition space leader and cultural front runner, and we have the pleasure of hearing about it. Our talk is also fascinating because she talks a lot about her doubts, thoughts and dreams about her total practice, and goddamn it, if that isn’t what this show is for, then what is it for? Enjoy!

We are back again today with another super interesting talk, with the artist group Mathias & Mathias. They had a show up at Overgaden a little while back, and we were fortunate enough to have the chance to sit down and talk to them. It was a great conversation, touching on many topics, with a lot of behind the scenes talk, which is always interesting. It’s good to hear from working artists what their experiences are in the art world, and that always leads into a discussion about their work. They are a group you should keep an eye on, they have a lot of interesting projects in the pipeline. And they are also gentlemen, which also such a nice thing to find out here in these mean streets. So with no further ado, enjoy our talk with Mathias & Mathias!

Today we are terribly excited to bring you an actually well timed conversation, with the wonderful Jonas Liveröd. It’s been a while coming, but it fits perfectly, because already on this Friday, April 20th, he has a solo show opening at the great Steinsland Berliner Gallery in Stockholm. So as awesome as the conversation we are about to play for you is, it’s always better to go and see the work in real time and space, so if you are anywhere near Stockholm, then you should go see the show. As a bonus, you can have a chat with Jonas, who is really just a sweet and open hearted fellow, so that comes highly recommended as well. It’s all good news from the Cultural Bandwidth headquarters today! I feel that Jonas needs no introduction, his work is excellent and lively, and we do a pretty good job of covering things in the talk. Thanks to Jeanette Steinsland for setting this up, and for all the support. Please enjoy our conversation with Jonas Liveröd!

Today, in serendipitous timing, we are joined by the art group Sara, Peter & Tobias, who were kind enough to sit down with us for a wide ranging conversation about their first book, Phenomina. And just last week they won the British Journal of Photography International Photography Award for their new project, The Merge. We had a very interesting conversation together not only about their projects, but also about the role of ego in photography, authorship, research, fundraising, and giving up your individuality to strengthen a group. This is a long one, but only because there was so much good stuff in there. Check out their book, Phenomina, we can’t recommend it enough, and keep and eye on their new project as it develops.

When you talk process with an artist, many similarities between practices begin to pop up over time, but there are also those occasions where you hear about more independent ways of working and thinking. Todays conversation with Johan Furåker is of that ilk, one of the ones which are quite inspiring. He’s a thoughtful artist, and methodical, and if you look at his work, you can see that his way of producing is certainly working well. There is a balance to doing your homework, research and inspirational legwork, yet keeping a sense of mystery, happy accident and experimentation in your practice, and I think Johan is one of the people who have been on this program who exemplifies that best. Please enjoy this talk with Johan Furåker.

Ah, the march of time, the learning of lessons, the rediscovery of delight! What a great talk we have for you today! In the middle of significant personal and political chaos we are so very proud to bring to you today a wonderful conversation with Ditte Ejlerskov recorded a couple of months ago. Talking to her was a reminder of so many important things one must hold dear as an artist; choosing the harder path at times, about trust in yourself and your relationship to your practice, the value of plain old hardheadedness. As humans we walk a fine line in balancing everything, and as artists’ it is essential. We must remember this, it is imperative, if for nothing else then for our own contentedness. Ditte has a big show up at Kristiansand Kunsthal in Norway called The Muse, which looks amazing, so if you are in that part of the world then be sure to check it out. Check out her website, it’s amazing just like her work, and check out the sound piece she made for the show, link is below. Enjoy!

We had the great pleasure of meeting and speaking with Yazan Khalili last week, who is the winner of the extract prize 2015 from GLStrand, and just opened his solo show there, by the name of No One Saw The Colours. We had a really fantastic talk about making art, politics, representation and working under tough conditions. Yazan is very dedicated to and active in art and culture in general, and on top of it is an interesting artist, so go see his show at GLStrand (up until 11th march), and enjoy our talk with Yazan Khalili.

One of the great things about making this show is the wide variation in experiences and interests we get to hear from the guests. After talking with Nanna last time, we have a completely different type of artist on the show today, with a very different kind of story. It’s nice, because as artists, you slowly start to realize that there isn’t a single way forward, or a rule, or a technique to“make it”. So in that spirit, we have Todd James on the show today. Todd is a really interesting artist, because he has been able to straddle so many different worlds throughout his career, and that is something a lot of people are afraid of doing, perhaps feeling that it would somehow dilute what they do, or confuse an audience. Todd doesn’t seem to have that fear. His credits are many, his skill plentiful, so let’s just get straight to our talk with him. Enjoy!

Welcome back, and happy New Year to all! We have a great artist and incredibly sweet human on the show today; Nanna Debois Buhl. I have gotten to know her a bit over the last year or so and the more I hear about what she does, and how she does it, the more I fall in love with her work. It’s thoughtful, well-researched and also very tactile, which I find to be a rare combination today. Often it’s hard for artists to lean equally on research and material when creating projects, and it’s something I think a lot about it terms of my own work. And so those are the themes of the conversation today, and I think you’ll find it really interesting. She also currently has works up in two different exhibitions, check below for links to those and other cool stuff. She is open hearted and very generous in the way she talks about her process, so let’s get straight to it. Enjoy!

Hello friends - we are tremendously proud to announce the launch of our new podcast network Cultural Bandwidth, as well as the new podcast we are blasting off with on the new network, By The Way: A Contemporary Art News Podcast. Cultural Bandwidth is the world's first podcasting network based around art, and we couldn't be happier to share this with you. There will be a lot of information about exactly what we are doing here in the new year, but in the meantime you can enjoy 6 episodes of BTW over the break, and we'll be back in January with brand new episodes of both The Undergang Armchair and BTW.

Greetings and salutations friends, nice to be back for another episode here. Things are cranking along here, you might have noticed that we have started to make some changes, especially on the website. But first, let’s talk about the guest today, Niels Pugholm. We were introduced to him through a captivating artist run space out in Valby, (an outer neighborhood of CPH) called KVADRAT16, and we sat down and talked right before he opened his show there. He a thoughtful, interesting artist who has been super active the last couple of years, popping up here and there with some wry and interesting shows. The only other news is really to ask you to excuse the mess while we build a new site. We are making some major changes to basically everything except this program, so stay tuned, we hope to unveil everything next week! In the meantime, please enjoy the talk with Niels Pugholm, and go check out his show at KVADRAT16! Links: Niels Pugholm | Instagram KVADRAT16 | Instagram

A couple of weeks ago the National Gallery of Art (SMK) here in Copenhagen unveiled a bronze sculpture in front of the museum by Gillian Wearing called A Real Danish Family. This is also in conjunction with an exhibition of her works, they are both well worth seeing. We were lucky enough to have the chance to sit down with Gillian to talk both about the sculpture she made about this danish family, and about her work in general. You are indubitably familiar with her work, she is quite well known, both as a YBA - the young british artists, and for her work since. If you have a chance to see the show here at SMK then you definitely should, several of her works are much stronger in person, for example the self-portraits of her as her family are pretty breathtaking in person. Enjoy, and stay tuned for some big news next time around!

One of the great pleasures of making this show is having conversations with people who have some history behind them, people who have seen the ins and outs of the art world through many years, and to hear what is and is not important to them. The guest today is Jean Marc Bustamante, and he is a perfect example of the type of experienced artist and person we speak of. He of course has a long and storied art career, well worth looking into, but he also has a history as a teacher, and now as the director of École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, which is a prestigious art school in Paris. For those who are around CPH at the moment, he also has a show up at Gallery Susanne Ottesen, which functions as a retrospective of sorts, and is very much worth seeing. He is a wise and humorous man, so please enjoy our talk with him!

We are joined today by artist extraordinaire Malin Gabriella Norden, who was here in town for the CHART art fair, because the homies over at Steinsland Berliner gallery were showing some of her works. She was awesome to talk to, and she keeps the game of being an artist to it’s bare basics, and we mean that positively. There isn’t a lot of extraneous material around her work and practices, and it’s a pleasure to talk to the people who’s work is dictated by a relationship to their materials and their drive to move said work forward. These are practitioners who dedicate themselves to the process of making, and view their work in the long term. And to put it simply, it’s refreshing, and not at all a disadvantage.

We have the fantastic Zven Balslev on today, which has been a long time coming, and we ended up talking about many facets of the art world, having a practice, and about the kind of expectations-slash-priorities you might have. One of the great things about making this show is hearing diverse viewpoints on this mess of making art, and Zven’s view on it is great. It’s one you honestly don’t here often enough. You can currently see his work at Sydhavn Station and at Grafik Galleriet, as well as cop his book, Pulp Magma, links on the show notes page. Please enjoy our talk with Zven Balslev!

We are back again here on the other side of CHART Art Fair with our wrap up from the events this year. It’s a two part episode, with the first part featuring a short discussion with the panel of speakers from one of the Chart Art Talks, namely Peter Pakesch, chairman of the Maria Lassning Foundation, Shwetal Patel, director of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Sofia Hernández Chong Cuy, curator at the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC), Hans-Ulrich Obrist, artistic director at Serpentine Galleries, and editor of ArtReview magazine Mark Rappolt. The second part of the show is guested by Helga Christoffersen, curator at The New Museum, who curated an exhibition of emerging nordic artists for the fair, by the name of CHART Emerging. We personally had a great time, sneaking around in journalists clothes and chatting with about 10 thousand different folks. It’s also overwhelming at the end of the day, but we’re sure we’ll be fresh again by the time next year rolls around. Keep your fingers crossed! Thanks to all the folks appearing on the show, and of course thanks to CHART for the collaboration. Enjoy!

In honor of our new collaboration with the CHART Art Fair, we have special episode out today, featuring some of the founding galleries and the director of the fair. Through talking with them about the ideas behind the fair and some of the guiding principles, we’ve compiled an oral history of sorts as a warm up to the event, which opens here in Copenhagen on Friday the 1st of September. It’s the 5th anniversary of the fair, and it was tremendously interesting to hear from the folks behind it, and there were even a few surprises along the way. We’ll be doing a bunch of recording and meeting of folks, so say hi if you catch us there, and stay tuned for the next few weeks of programing from the fair.