COPENHAGEN.- This year’s big summer exhibition at Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art is curated by the internationally acclaimed artist Gitte Villesen. The exhibition, with the title I Slipped into my First Metamorphosis so Quietly that no one Noticed, is based on the radically transformative power of stories.

From docufiction to total installation and sculptural forms, the exhibition reflects a fascination with stories as a direct tool for debating and changing reality, and the impact the narratives of literature, art and film can have on how we see the world. Villesen’s title is taken from Octavia E. Butler’s ground-breaking sci-fi trilogy Lilith's Brood – a complex narrative of power, oppression, dependency, solidarity, and love. The exhibition explores different approaches to everyday life – from small stories, personal experiences and portraits of real people in real contexts, to concepts of otherness, territorialism, gender norms, sexuality and identity.

The exhibited works span a century, including photographs by Claude Cahun & Marcel Moore from 1932-1945 and Raphaël Grisey and Bouba Touré’s archive installation with the 1975 docufiction SAFRANA portraying a group of immigrants in France who want to return to Senegal to start a farming cooperative. At exactly the same time as the film was being made, a collective farm was actually created in Senegal – an interaction between fiction and reality that also characterises other works in the exhibition.There are cross-references and overlaps between different collaborations and manifestations throughout Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, and between each gallery. Many of the works are large-scale video installations, but the exhibition also includes a collection of books, previously forgotten and recently reprinted photographs, as well as other forms of documentation.

The participating artists are: Ana Mendieta, Alex Mawimbi, Berverly Buchanan, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Elke Marhöfer and Mikhail Lylov, Emma Haugh, Gitte Villesen with Dendal, Marie Høeg and Bolette Berg, Saidou Ndiaye, Amadou Sarr, Acroma and Chiara Figone, Ingrid Villesen, Laura Horelli, Pia Rönicke, Raphaël Grisey with Bouba Touré, Káddu Yaraax, Sidney Sokhona and Somankidi Coura Cooperative.

From her long-term base in Berlin, Danish artist Gitte Villesen has established a broad international network, reflected in the diversity of artists participating in the exhibition. At an early stage of her career, in the mid-1990s Villesen became an exponent of anti-aesthetic, semi-documentary videos and installations. She has a vast back catalogue of exhibitions, including participation in the 2005 Venice Biennale. Educated at the University of Copenhagen and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, stories have always been central to her practice as an artist. Unedited and unpretentious in style, Villesen’s video works explore the potential of documentary, but are devoid of the clear messages or problem-solving approach that often characterises the genre. By pointing her video camera at the reality that forms the raw material of her works, she generates a physical intimacy in which her own role and presence is always explicit.

Villesen carefully avoids social generalisations in works that can be seen as portraits in the broadest sense, investigating the ways individuals and social groups form their lives within the framework of the cultural opportunities available to them.