Nervetråde: Performance by Sara Sjölin & Ville Laurinkoski

Nervetråde (Nerve Fibers) revolves around the grotesque, tracing threads from the nervous sensibility of literature around 1900, when Den Frie was founded, to the frayed nerves of contemporary art. The exhibition brings together works by Danish and international artists whose works pulse with the unease and strangeness running through our time. Across three evenings during the exhibition period, we present an eccentric and off-kilter performance programme of dance, music, language and more to explore the undersides of the categories and conventions that structure the familiar world.

This evening features Sara Sjölin’s new work (2026) and Daniel Daniela (2026) by Ville Laurinkoski.

Admission with normal entrance fee.

New work – by Sara Sjölin

Sara Sjölin’s new performance takes her improvisational working method as its point of departure. It is developed as a response to Nervetråde’s underlying ideas.

new work, 2026 Performance Courtesy the artist

Daniel Daniela – by Ville Laurinkoski

Daniel-Daniela, a novel by the Danish author Karl Larsen, was first published in German in 1908 and in Danish in 1922, and recently republished. Revolving around a man named Daniel who writes a diary as Daniela—Larsen’s derisive caricature of an effeminate homosexual—the book is simultaneously fascinated and repelled by homosexuality. Laurinkoski’s Daniel Daniela collapses time and transposes text excerpts into a new work that pushes nervousness about homosexuality to a high pitch. The work reframes a troublesome historical document in terms of contemporary discourses about identity and desire.

Biographies

Sara Sjölin (b. 1991) is a Swedish-Swiss artist working across film, speech, performance and installation. She holds an MFA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and has presented her work internationally at institutions including Kunsthaus Zürich, Copenhagen Contemporary, Kunsthal Aarhus and SALTS in Basel. Her artistic practice explores the affective dimensions of comedy as it emerges from tragedy, everyday observation and spontaneous imagination. Through fictionalisation and the reconfiguration of partial truths, she creates narrative and poetic worlds. For Nervetråde, Sara Sjölin presents a new performance centred on the act and psychology of crime.

Ville Laurinkoski (b. 1996, Finland) is a visual artist and performer based in Copenhagen. Laurinkoski works with suggestive interiors and scenographic works composed of mass-produced objects, misplaced materials, dysfunctional furniture, and readymades, often combined with voice and speech in the form of sound or live performance. Drawing on literature, autobiographical writing, the history of gay activism, and commercial music, his artistic practice explores the social, economic, linguistic, and spatial systems that shape our lives. Through inaccessible and unconsumable spaces, he transforms experiences of loneliness and rejection into collective scenes and landscapes. Laurinkoski has recently exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (2026), Kunsthalle Wien (2025), SIMIAN (2025), Nikolaj Kunsthal (2025), and Kunsthal Charlottenborg (2023), among others.