Nikhil Vettukattil, Filip Vest, Marina Dubia, Jules Fischer, Lina Hashim, Klara Lopez
Intimacy & Publicness
Curated by Joachim Aagaard Friis
Exhibition
June 20, 2025 → June 22, 2025
Fredag: 19:00-21:00
Lørdag: 15:00-19:30
Søndag: 15:00-18:30
Opening/vernissage:
June 21, 2025, 15:00-19:30
IMAGE
Design by Filip Grønning
TEXT
Intimacy & Publicness is a three-day public performative arts program unfolding in and around Blågårds Plads, Nørrebro, featuring artists Nikhil Vettukattil, Filip Vest, Marina Dubia, Jules Fischer, Lina Hashim, and Klara Lopez.
Curated by Joachim Aagaard Friis in collaboration with SixtyEight Art Institute, PASS – Center for Practice-based Art Studies at the University of Copenhagen, and Støberiet – Copenhagen Municipality, the program explores how intimate affects—typically reserved for private relationships—might be shared and collectively experienced in public through the medium of performance art.
Inspired by cultural theorist Lauren Berlant’s concept of intimate publics, the program investigates how performance can cultivate trust, emotional resonance, and social connection among strangers in shared urban space. What happens when intimacy becomes a collective, public experience?
Through site-specific and public performances, artists will activate Blågårds Plads and its surroundings—a square originally designed as a communal gathering place and framed by Kai Nielsen’s century-old granite sculptures of the working class. The performances engage with the site’s layered histories while exploring how contemporary urban environments can accommodate intimate encounters between different identities, communities, and narratives.
At a time when diversity and the notion of safe spaces are once again under threat, Intimacy & Publicness seeks to carve out space for queer and marginalized expressions of intimacy in the public realm. The program reimagines what it means to be together in difference, asking how art can generate new forms of belonging—temporary, affective, and collective—amid the chaos and vulnerability of urban life.