COPENHAGEN.- With jellyfish sculpted in sugar and preserved in cooking oil, drag performers in red post office uniforms and bikini-clad deck chairs, art creates images of our present and future. On 17 August the exhibition Young Danish Art - Forecasting the Future opens at ARKEN. The exhibition is showing works by a young generation of artists with a political outlook and issues at heart.

Young Danish Art - Forecasting the Future presents innovative and playful works that take the temperature of our society and explore national and global themes such as work culture, the sense of belonging and climate crisis. The exhibition offers unique insight into a young generation of artists and shows the forecasts art is making for our future.

Portrait of Denmark in cabaret costumes
Work culture is a theme that several of the exhibition artists take up with works that revolve around value, tempo, productivity and identity. This goes for example for the visual artist Kirsten Astrup. She presents her caricatured social satires as flamboyant film cabarets with insistent drag make-up, tuba music and props in papier-mâché. In the exhibition's work Faithful and Diligent (2017) the scene is set in the old Central Post Office in Copenhagen, where we follow a group of postal workers in classic red postmen's uniforms and drag make-up until they receive the message that their workplace has been closed down - and from there on the action picks up. With equal proportions of humour and nostalgia, Kirsten Astrup deals with the decline of the welfare society, but the work also offers hope for new community structures.

Immortal jellyfish
Climate change and reflections on human relations with other species are also strong themes in Young Danish Art - Forecasting the Future. Visual artist Silas Inoue works with living sculptures of organic materials. In the work series Future Friture (2018) he has sculpted marvellous jellyfish in sugar and sunk them in cooking oil, which preserves them. Spanning both life and death, Inoue's immutable jellyfish refer to two marine species in nature that can metamorphose from an old to a young phase and are therefore regarded as immortal. The works thus link up with mankind's technological striving for eternal life, but also refer to sugar - one of nature's most fundamental building blocks - and its variegated cultural history. Questions about evolution, invasion and expansion between species are at play.

Ten young artists
Young Danish Art - Forecasting the Future presents over 25 works and includes installations, sculptures, films and works in a number of other media. The ten participating artists were all born in the 1980s and experiment with new materials and modes of expression when they explore and challenge the time we live in and question the future we are facing. They are: Nanna Abell (b. 1985), Hannah Toticki Anbert (b. 1984), Kirsten Astrup (b. 1983), Benedikte Bjerre (b. 1987), Silas Inoue (b. 1981), Mo Maya Moesgaard (b. 1980), Astrid Myntekær (b. 1985), Tabita Rezaire (b. 1989), Masar Sohail (b. 1982) and Marie Thams (b. 1982). The exhibition can be experienced at ARKEN from 17 August up to and including 15 March 2020.