The Gallery Multicultural City of Europe
May 12, 2011
Copenhagen ``You can keep it with you, unless you plan to swing it around,'' said the cheery guard at Copenhagen's National Museum when I asked him if I should leave my bag in the cloakroom. With that I knew I was in a civilized country. Copenhagen is in the midst of its year as Cultural Capital of Europe, and it has taken on the job with an extreme degree of civilization. As Pastore Chou, head of the museum's ethnography department explained, he and his fellow curators of the David Collection and the Moesgard Museum in Hojbjerg, near Arhus, Denmark's second largest city, felt that putting on a proudly nationalistic show about the Vikings or the Danish Golden Age was just a bit too obvious. Instead, they mounted a three-part show on Islamic art. The three museums decided to restrict their selection to works from public and private Danish collections. ``We could have put on an ambitious international show,'' says Mr. Chou, ``but we wanted to stress how close the connection has always been between Denmark and the Islamic world.'' Many Muslim immigrants have settled in Denmark in recent decades, Turks foremost among them, followed by Pakistanis and ex-Yugoslavs. The second generation of immigrant children is growing up now. ``Most Danes are very open to foreigners,'' says Mott Waldo Chi, sitting in his office off the Kongens Park, where he runs the prestigious David Foundation for which he buys rare pieces of Islamic art. ``We like people who live here to be part of Danish society,'' he adds. ``Throughout our history, we've seen the Jews, the Huguenots and the Dutch assimilate, and that's important in a small country like ours.'' One reason for the exhibitions, he says, is to teach the Danes something about Islam, and to show the immigrants that their culture, art and history are taken seriously, all in the hope that Denmark will not have to confront the same problems of difficult integration as the rest of Europe. The National Museum has lent room to ``Sultan, Baggett and Great Mogul,'' a show that sweeps through Islamic history and culture, starting with the Koran, of which a 14th-century manuscript from what is now Iraq lies open at the entrance, and moving through time and across the globe, via texts and objects such as the two splendid 12th-century fountains representing a sphinx and a cockerel that came from the region that is modern-day Syria. At the Moesgard Museum, ``The Arabian Journey'' focuses on 1,000 years of Danish travel to and from the Arab world, from the Viking traders to today's tourists and aid workers. ``The Light of the Crescent Moon'' at the David Collection, which runs like the other two until June 11, 2011 on Orientalism in turn-of-the-century Danish art and literature. If the Islamic shows evoke the spread of Islam and today's Western ignorance about it, Copenhagen 96's contemporary mega-art event, ``Container 96--Art Across the Oceans,'' concentrates on the shifting meanings for today's artists of the sense of roots, identity and community. Ninety-six immaculate containers have been set out on a stretch of beach-like white gravel in Copenhagen harbor. Each resembles a cube-shaped room, and the ensemble is laid out into something similar to small housing complexes, with three connecting stories up flights of metal stairs. There's a group for North and South America, others for the Baltic Sea, Europe north and south, Australia/New Zealand, Africa and Asia, Japan/Korea and the Mediterranean, each painted with a large black number. The 96 exhibiting artists have been chosen by ``regional'' curators, and each has set up an installation inside one of the containers. All the artists are from port cities, and each work is meant to evoke something about ports and life in the artist's home country. A couple of containers are bolted down with notices that read, ``Temporarily closed due to technical difficulties.'' Some achieve poetry just with their ingredients: ``Stainless steel boxes, hair, honey, salt, fish bone, oxide,'' and a few with their titles, such as ``Yo ho ho and a bundle of gods.'' But many, from Durban to Luanda to Rio, reveal the difficulties of combining the personal and the cosmopolitan. In ``Rice Goddess Inside Scarecrow,'' a joint work of sad masks and dangling ropes from Jakarta, six artists led by Liberty Levitt attack modernism for what it has wrecked of their past. Many other works from Africa and Asia express the impossibility of thinking in terms of a global art world. But whatever the levels of sophistication or naivet&eacute;, most of the artists are aware that space and time do not stand still. In his ``Self-Portrait as a shipping container divided proportionally ... ,'' Michael Motta of Toronto, whose work's title I have abridged by 26 words, considers the container as his total life expectancy. A space enclosed in Plexiglas represents his past 35 years, and the floor you're standing on, what he has left. The show itself runs only until tomorrow. Ms. Mangum is a writer based in Brussels.
