Installation shot. Photo: Anders Sune Berg 01/19

Participating artists: Kristina Ask, Jens Haaning, Jens Hultquist, Huskegruppen (Peter Brandt og Tomas Lagermand Lundme), Frans Jacobi, Tanja Rau & Olof Olsson, Lars Rank, Ursula Reuter Christiansen and Mette Winckelmann. The exhibition is curated by Kristina Ask and Tomas Lagermand Lundme.

Many Danes' idea of China is composed of impressions from e.g. cheap merchandise from Chinese shops, China's position in relation to environment, democracy and human rights, the images from the massacre at Tiananmen Square, the rice paper lamps in the nursery, the Mao shoes from Irma, the television transmissions from the Olympic Games in Beijing and the bamboo shoots in the take-away menu. The group show China Shop. State of Emergency is a discussion of China as cultural phenomenon and political world power on a global market in the throes of a depression, construed by a number of Danish artists in an everyday perspective.

The exhibition takes the form of a shop, a shopping street and a square, featuring Chinese crisis events, so-called Assemblies, throughout the exhibition period. Thus, it is a s dynamic exhibition that will change character continually during the exhibition period. The Assemblies will feature a copious programme including performances, tea salons, lectures and debates, a sale of crisis jars and noodle soup kitchen. As always at Overgaden, the events will form an integrated part of the exhibition and serve both as works and as presentational materials to be seen, heard, tasted, felt, recollected and contemplated.

The curators – visual artists Tomas Lagermand Lundme and Kristina Ask – seek to focus on the concept of a state of exception as a crisis situation in which the normal condition is suspended and must be renegotiated. Occasioned by the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 and the present financial crisis, the crisis situation is closely investigated, both as a danger and as a possibility.

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