IN PROTEST AND IN CARE at O-Overgaden

IN PROTEST AND IN CARE is a group exhibition bringing together works by 18 Danish and international artists and artist groups, addressing vulnerability and impairment, as well as care and resistance.

Several of the works offer insights into concrete, lived experiences of illness, functional variation, and disability, including being confronted by both external demands and self-imposed expectations. At the same time, various works point to the architectural, institutional, structural, and linguistic barriers that create and uphold divides between the non-normative and the normative, the unproductive and the productive, the sick and the healthy.

Across a wide range of materials and media, the works propose new languages for experiences of marginalization and vulnerability, but also for interdependence and new forms of community. The artistic expressions move between the poetic and imaginative, the political and the humorous and point to, among other things, impatience and a resistance to labeling language and stigmatization. Central is also the idea of “crip time”—denoting a flexible time that bends to the rhythm of the individual body and mind, rather than bending bodies and minds to fast- paced schedules.

The title of the exhibition is borrowed from the earlier work At Work (In Protest and in Care) by participating artist Alex Dolores Salerno. Although that work is not present in the exhibition, the title is an apt heading for the underlying question at stake. It emphasizes that there is protest in care, just as there is care in protesting against society’s existing arrangements and structures. The absence of the title work also points to the many voices and stories that are not present at O—Overgaden, but which nevertheless have a significant place in the broader discussion to which the exhibition contributes.

The exhibition IN PROTEST AND IN CARE is curated by Anne Kølbæk Iversen as part of the research project Crip Time—Art of Impairment, Withdrawal, and Impatience, hosted by O—Overgaden and the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen and funded by the New Carlsberg Foundation (2024–27).

The project is part of a larger investigation of the institution’s own shortcomings, not least the lack of accessibility to O—Overgaden’s listed building. While O—Overgaden is working to ensure physical access to the building, several events and accessibility initiatives have been developed for the exhibition.