Bubble Metropolis

Charlottenborg Art Cinema collaborates with the exhibition venue Vermillion Sands for the exhibition Bubble Metropolis. From 2 February to 10 March, Kunsthal Charlottenborg will screen a film programme featuring works by The Otolith Group and Allan Sekula & Noël Burch – a programme which constitutes a central part of the exhibition Bubble Metropolis, on show at Vermillion Sands in Tagensvej 85 (Kbh N) until 16 March.

The idea of the sea as a resource – both literally and metaphorically – forms the starting point of the group show Bubble Metropolis. The film Hydra Decapita (2010) by The Otolith Group, screened in the cinema at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, explores ideas about globalisation, capitalism and climate change with particular emphasis on the relationship between money, death, abstraction and language. This is done via a study of the techno act Drexciya from Detroit, which, back in the 1990s, built a mythological narrative about an underwater world inhabited by the unborn children of pregnant enslaved women thrown overboard as casualties of the Atlantic slave trade.

Kunsthal Charlottenborg’s cinema also shows the essayistic film The Forgotten Space (2010) by Allan Sekula & Noël Burch. In this tale the sea is seen as a potential source of capital. The film follows the vast infrastructure of container ships, trains, engineers and politicians who together form the basis of the money-making machine that the sea can be. The film juxtaposes maritime trade and the complex, symbolically charged story of the sea in general.

The exhibition venue Vermillion Sands shows the exhibition Bubble Metropolis featuring Calder Harben’s Bodies of Water (2017–19) and Amitai Romm’s An obstinate craving for sleep (2018).

Bubble Metropolis is the first chapter of Vermilion Sands’s themed exhibition series on The Speculative, which will run throughout 2019. Over the course of the year, a range of visual, formal, intellectual and scientific experiments will manifest themselves through speculative, artistic and fictional scenarios. The overall framing facilitates explorations into how areas such as sci-fi, cli-fi, migration, biotechnology, utopias, the Anthropocene, Afrofuturism and linguistics are connected in myriad ways and cannot be considered separately without diminishing each of them.

These days, the sea evokes associations to climate crisis and migration issues, making it more current than ever. By juxtaposing the four works and the various potential meanings they generate, Vermilion Sands offers its take on how we might view and perceive this enthralling phenomenon right here, right now.

Bubble Metropolis

Featured artists: Calder Harben (CA/DK), The Otolith Group (UK) Amitai Romm (DK), Allan Sekula (US) & Noël Burch (US).
Film screening programme (Kunsthal Charlottenborg): 5 February – 10 March
Exhibition (Vermillion Sands, Tagensvej 86, 2200 Kbh N): 2 February – 16 March