Back to the Future

ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE

Sara Sjölin premiers her most recent work Back to the Future in a series of four 2-hour presentations. Incorporating video and Sjölin’s characteristic commentarial performance, Back to the Future bidirectionally narrates a series of multilayered events in which Sjölin and her Collaborator set out to uncover hidden artistic visions in the everyday performativity of city life – through extensive use of time travel.

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ABOUT THE ARTIST

The work of Swedish-Swiss, Copenhagen-based artist Sara Sjölin is centered on the affective dimensions of comedy as it emerges in aestheticized forms of tragedy, mundane observation and spontaneous imagination. Enacted in film, speech, performance and installation, Sjölin’s work creatively blends partial truths in revealing the multifaceted nature of meta-narrative and poetic worlds.

Sara Sjölin has presented her work at Uniondocs (US), Lagune Ouest (DK), Kunsthaus Zürich (CH), Konstnärshuset (SE), CPH:DOX (DK), Copenhagen Contemporary (DK), Galleri Susanne Ottesen (DK), Kunsthal Aarhus (DK) and SALTS (CH). She has been an Artist in Residence at the Danish Institute in Rome and at ISCP in New York through the support of the Danish Arts Foundation. Sjölin holds an MFA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.

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PERFORMANCE BULLETIN

Den Frie and Toaster presents the upcoming performance festival The Performance Bulletin, which will take place June 5-8 2025. Together with Danish and international performance artists, we investigate how situational performance pieces can introduce alternative ways of engaging and experiencing contemporary art.  Formed by artistic actions that disrupts our attention and opens the senses, the program asks what kinds of imaginations can be activated through embodied, situated, and processual performances.

The program is based on close collaborations with artists, who experiment with everything from feminist openings of symbols and monuments in the city, to collective dance ecstasies, vocal performances, joints dinners, performative explorations of the city’s infrastructure,s and traffic hubs, to as well as performance pieces that slow down the paste pace and enhance our sensitivity. Improvisation and movement are central forces in the program, which experiment with access and negotiate of the use of the public space. Celebrating the unexpected, indeterminate, and estranged impulse of performances, the program tests public attention and social processes by the happening of art.

The program is curated by Iben Bach Elmstrøm in close collaborations and dialogue with the artists and the, Toaster and Den Frie curatorial teams. The program is generously supported by New Carlsberg Foundation, Bikuben Foundation, Danish Arts Council and Roskilde University.