About
SixtyEight Art Institute is a non-profit, independent organisation for contemporary art located in central Copenhagen. Our exhibitions, events and public programmes represent Nordic, European, and International artists and curators, and endeavour to develop a ‘Danish internationalism’ through which artistic and curatorial research projects can respond to and address international debates and discourses from the perspective of our base in Copenhagen.
SixtyEight Art Institute is an intimate space, both in terms of the way audiences meet with art and the ideas it generates, and in the way the Institute works closely with partners and focuses on co-productions. The Institute supports cross-regional and cross-institutional models for knowledge and resource-sharing, to help advance the role of the arts and their intersection with science, literature and philosophy.
To this end, SixtyEight has a partnership with Fonden FABRIKKEN for Kunst og Design, through which artists and curators taking part in FABRIKKEN’s World Wide Air, FAIR and FIDA artist in residency programmes have the opportunity to engage with the Institute on a professional level, presenting their practices and current research in the form of talks and lectures at SixtyEight Art Institute, as well as meeting with our curatorial team and its international network. We also collaborate with Rønnebæksholm, a regional kunsthalle in Næstved, Denmark, regarding its forthcoming residency programme.
As a non-profit arts organisation, SixtyEight Art Institute is also a non-partisan group that supports the free speech of artists and curators and their research projects.
History
SixtyEight Art Institute was established in 2011 as 68 Square Metres in a disused paint factory from the 1940s, which had been given to cultural entrepreneurs and small creative business for a number of years. We created an exhibition space in an old laboratory within the existing industrial structure, which was part of a dynamic group of artists, musicians, designers, event organisers, and urban gardeners. Together we brought a new set of possibilities and cultural activities to the area. We were at the same time part of a movement of independent exhibition spaces and commercial galleries to the East Amager quarter of Copenhagen, and took the opportunity to initiate and organise a coordination of the galleries and cultural activities in the neighbourhood through a concept called First Fridays.
In October 2018, SixtyEight Art Institute was awarded BKF-Prisen, the Danish Union of Artists’ prize for best independent space of the year. The motivation for the award included that SixtyEight’s “ambition and international focus are unparalleled in Denmark, even among the state-funded institutions”. At the end of 2019 SixtyEight received a prize from the Danish Arts Foundation “towards continued work”, the Foundation stating that “SixtyEight has filled a hole in the market, and it is difficult to see how we could do without the institute”.
Our current exhibtion programme, Memoirs of Saturn, seeks to investigate how we can re-imagine the term 'prosperity' as a common value we have the chance to develop through art, in and with nature, and has received generous support from the Danish Arts Foundation, Det Obelske Familiefond, and Beckett-Fonden.
As part of this aim to rethink how we do programming in all its facets, we have entered into partnerships with Oinofilia (lit: love of wine), a local importer of Greek natural wines from smaller to medium-sized wineries, all of which have a green (organic or biodynamic) philosophy, unique terroir, grape specialization, history and tradition in common. Oinofilia will be providing carefully selected wines at all our opening and events for the duration of this exhibition programme.
SixtyEight Art Institute's previous two-year exhibition programme, Modes and Notes on the Local, received support from the Danish Arts Foundation and Københavns Kommunes Råd for Visuel Kunst.
The Curatorial Thing received support from Nordic Culture Point
SixtyEight's first two-year exhibition programme, A Dictionary of Advanced Difference, received support from the Danish Arts Foundation and Bikubenfonden
