The ARKEN Travel Grant is donated by the Annie & Otto Johs. Detlefs’ Almennyttige Foundation. The purpose of the travel grant is to further young artists’ and curators’ knowledge of and dialogue with the international art scene.

The grant aims to allow younger artists and curators to travel and learn about art abroad, see exhibitions, conduct research, be inspired, set up networks and swap ideas and knowledge. The travel grant cannot be applied for, but is awarded to professional and working artists and curators. The total grant fund available is DKK 100,000 a year, awarded in two amounts of DKK 50,000 each.

DONATED BY ANNIE & OTTO JOHS. DETLEFS' PHILANTROPIC FOUNDATION

Nina Beier, Allegory of Charity, 2015. Photo: Document Photography

2017

Nina Beier’s enigmatic works consist of a wide variety of everyday objects in mys­te­rious and subtle compositions. Squashed wigs, savaged china dogs and vases, giant cocktails and hovering coffee cups surprise us on the one hand as artworks, on the other as absurd transformations of the familiar. Her surreal works are at once profoundly complex and extremely simple in their playful defi­ance of the force of gravity, the relationship between life and death and a standard 1:1 understanding of scale. Pivoting on the element of surprise, Beier completely transforms reality.

Nina Beier is awarded the ARKEN Travel Grant 2017 because she elegantly and critically shakes up our world­view. When our habitual notions and ideas are challenged for a while, the poten­tial for new understandings arises. Beier’s works offer precisely this potential, and this is why she has been awarded the ARKEN Travel Grant.

Marie Kølbæk Iversen, Nine Bats, 2016. Photo: Anders Sune Berg

2017

Marie Kølbæk Iversen works with video, photography, light and sound installations. Her works tempt us with their seductive finish and their accurate and apparently simple construction, but behind the minimalist expression of the works lie complex technical structures and concepts. In several of her works the viewer is given a central place. Kølbæk Iversen’s abstract, colourful patterns engage us bodily and immerse us in installations that are all about the body, physica­lity and phenomena such as phantom limb pains. The works conceal poetic and existential narratives about what it means to be human.

Marie Kølbæk Iversen is awarded the ARKEN Travel Grant 2017 for her distinctive ability to render vis­ible invisible features such as bodily feelings and sensibilities. She expands the world of art by working across the boundaries of the sciences and the arts, as she highlights the vulnerable, sensing, active body.

Astrid Myntekær, Orgone, 2014. Photo: Anders Sune Berg

2016

Astrid Myntekær works in a thematic borderland between science and mysticism. By combining high technology with simple, easily accessible materials she is able to create installations that are both delicate and spectacular. They explore the invisible forces that perhaps exert an influence on the surrounding world.

Astrid Myntekær received the ARKEN Travel Grant 2016 because with her seductive works she invites the viewer to engage in bodily reflection over the spatial and sensory situation. Astrid Myntekær speaks of her installations as shelters or sanctuaries that permit the viewer to fantasize because rational everyday things are kept out. In this way Astrid Myntekær interweaves bodily sensation with explorations of occultism, science and current social conditions in a magical, playful aesthetic.

Peter Callesen, Impenetrable Castle, 2005. Photo: Anders Sune Berg

2016

Peter Callesen has made paper and scissors his trademark. His production ranges from beautiful, ingenious cut-outs to grand-scale paper installations, and one is impressed again and again by the way he succeeds in cutting out shapes one never thought possible. Metamorphoses and transformations take pride of place when Callesen investigates how a flat, blank piece of paper can be changed and suddenly become spatial and figurative.

Peter Callesen received the ARKEN Travel Grant 2016 because with simple materials he is able to create sur­prising visual narratives that touch on big existential issues but do so in a playful, humorous way that evokes a response in all of us. In the encounter with the works one reflects for example over one’s own per­­so­nal history, but also the general human condition in its social and cultural context.

Gudrun Hasle, Gudruns livshistiore, 2004. Photo: Gudrun Hasle

2015

With a point of departure in her own experience Gudrun Hasle grapples with life’s difficult sides and taboo subjects. Despite – or perhaps even because of – her dyslexia, writing is a recurring element in Gudrun Hasle’s work, which is used honestly to elucidate how she has felt ‘different’ for most of her life.

Gudrun Hasle was awarded the ARKEN Travel Grant 2015 for her works, which through personal history thematize being different in a society that often demands that one exists in a particular way. Gudrun Hasle thus invites reflection over a number of more general conditions for modern humanity.

Karoline H Larsen, Collective Strings, Helsinki, 2014. Photo: Anu Pynnönen

2015

Karoline H Larsen creates participation-based performances and temporary interventions in public space which challenge the form and use of urban space. By cutting across habitual paths, Karo­line H Larsen’s works force us to stop and discover the city anew.

Karoline H Larsen was awarded the ARKEN Travel Grant 2015 for her extraordinary ability to involve people in collective actions which in informal and playful ways bring people closer together and make us think about how we interact with and are influenced by our surroundings.

Astrid Kruse Jensen, Within the landscape #11, 2013

2014

Dream visions, incredible stories and artistic subjects. Astrid Kruse Jensen’s photographs often contain disturbing, supernatural themes linked to parallel worlds or childhood memories. Her works are both seductively beautiful and menacingly bleak.

Astrid Kruse Jensen was awarded the ARKEN Travel Grant 2014 for her ability to highlight staged, contrasting and eternal states through photography. Her works grab us by creating common stories that send us on an emotionally powerful journey into our memories.

Emil Westman Hertz, Coffin, 2008-11. ARKEN's collection

2014

Emil Westman Hertz created touching stories and mystical worlds in the cross-field between ethnography, museology and pathology. He worked with sculptures, installations and collage, where he used materials such as bones, clay, bronze and beeswax. Transformation and change, life and death are consistent themes in his art.

Emil Westman Hertz received the ARKEN Travel Grant 2014 because through his works he makes us aware of life’s perishability and the natural decline in every living organism. His works contain a rare union of vulnerability and indomitable life force.

Jesper Rasmussen, Alexanderplatz, Berlin, 2012

2013

Jesper Rasmussen works with photography, sculpture and installation. He is interested in how art can challenge our perception of reality. He breaks away from photography’s traditional challenge of the truth and realism. He focuses particularly on our perceptions of space, scale and perspective.

Jesper Rasmussen received the ARKEN Travel Grant 2013 for forcing us to look differently at our usual surroundings with the help of special and digital intervention in his photographs.

Thilo Frank, The Phoenix is closer than it appears, 2010. KUNSTEN Museum of Modern Art

2013

Thilo Frank currently stands out as one of German art’s most promising installation artists. In a playful and poetic manner, he enters a physical dialogue with the beholder through his interactive works. In his mirror installation ‘The Phoenix is closer than it appears’, you sway back and forth in a mirror cube while the room’s boundaries open into endless reflections of yourself.

Thilo Frank received the ARKEN Travel Grant 2013 for his ability to make us better co-creators of works of art and for making us aware of our presence in the world.

Tove Storch, Untitled (blue/blue #1-4), 2011. Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

2012

Tove Storch’s works are at once shaky and sensuous and massive and minimal. They have a down-played, insistent presence, which reflect her excellent sense of the material’s beauty. She works with materials such as silk, which she often stretches over a frame construction. In this way she challenges the idea of whether sculpture is solid.

Tove Storch received the ARKEN Travel Grant 2012 for her ability through sculpture to challenge our spatial awareness and our perception of sculpture as a form of art.

AVPD, Hitchcock Hallway, 2010. Courtesy AVPD, IKON Gallery and Galeria Leme. Photo: Stuart Whipps

2012

The collaborative and artistic duo AVPD consists of Aslak Vibæk and Peter Døssing, who have worked together since 1997. In AVPD’s installations nothing is as it should be. They represent a sort of architecture that creates unexpected spatial situations. We have to navigate round rooms, which diverts us from our usual experience of rooms and time.

AVPD received the ARKEN Travel Grant 2012 for their original, performative installations, which challenge our spatial, physical and psychological experience of the world.

Eva Steen Christensen, Beginnings and Ends, 2014. ARKEN's collection

2011

Eva Steen Christensen’s sculptures and installations are based on architecture and familiar everyday objects. She processes and transforms objects so that they lose their functional logic, and become absurd, fascinating sculptures from an unknown dream world.

Eva Steen Christensen received the ARKEN Travel Grant 2011 for her ability to unfold and bring to life sculpture as a contemporary medium for her unique sensual development of the spatial world of opportunities.

Rune Gade

2011

Rune Gade is a lecturer and Ph.d. student at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen. For many years Rune Gade has been dedicated to research, teaching and communication at an exemplary high level. In addition to Danish and international contemporary art, his research areas include photography, performance, gender theory and museology.

Rune Gade received the ARKEN Travel Grant 2011 for his impressive research efforts in art history, his unique commitment to teaching and for his major importance as a motivator in the Danish art world.

Ferdinand Ahm Krag, Untitled, 2010. Photo: Anders Sune Berg

2010

Through his drawings Ferdinand Ahm Krag makes us mindful of the rhythm of our breathing, the rhythm in music, cloud formations, energy and mind flows. These are impulses we feel, but which we can’t necessarily see or take in with only our eyes.

Ferdinand Ahm Krag received the ARKEN Travel Grant 2010 for his ability to visualise the fundamental but intangible sides of human existence and the physical reality around us.

Hans Hamid Rasmussen, Tic Tac II, 2008. ARKEN's collection

2010

Hans Hamid Rasmussen investigates the connection between memory, specific places and a multicultural identity. He creates large embroideries and exploits character traits through this traditional craft to depict the essence of memory and its meaning for our identity.

Hans Hamid Rasmussen received the ARKEN Travel Grant 2010 for his consistent artistic work on visualising the transient nature of memory and for giving embroidery new importance as a global craft.

Jesper Just, Bliss and Heaven, 2004. Still. ARKEN's collection

2009

Jesper Just creates Hollywood type film productions. He compiles the language of films with a surprising and challenging content. In elegant and stirring big movie formats, he gives e.g. gender clichés unexpected twists; a trucker jumps out as a singing transvestite, a hermaphrodite is searcing for love etc. Just consciously uses film to highlight and challenge the norms of identity formation.

Jesper Just received the ARKEN Travel Grant 2009 for his professionally composed and unorthodox art film, which questions our notion of gender and identity.

2009

Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen works with identity. As an anthropologist she explores cultural life forms and rituals. In her performance she often uses her body, her gender and her background as a Dane-Philippine. Her works often have a glint in their eye, while also relevantly and earnestly handling key themes about gender, race and cultural identity.

Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen received the ARKEN Travel Grant 2009 for her feminist courage, her energetic input and for her eye-opening and in-depth performances.

Eva Koch, Villar, 2001. Still

2008

Eva Koch brings sound, light and video into her art. She was among the first artists in Denmark to work with the latest media. Many of her works are linked to travel. This also applies to her main work Villar from 2001, where in an innovative type of video installation she talks of her own incredible family saga.

Eva Koch received the ARKEN Travel Grant 2008 for her ability to communicate shape, space and image in a sharp, intelligent and compromised manner. Her simple and powerful sculptures become installations or land art, which intervene with its surroundings.

Morten Schelde, Red Hand in the Sky, 2005. ARKEN's collection

2008

Through his magical and fascinating drawings, Morten Schelde leads his beholders into dreamy scenarios, where recognisable and surreal objects are added together, like a David Lynch film.
In 2003 Morten Schelde took part in the Galathea 3-expedition, and his numerous photographs from here formed the source of his later drawings.

Morten Schelde received the ARKEN Travel Grant 2008 for bringing a classic media such as drawing into modern times.

Anders Brinch, Cancer, 2006. ARKEN's collection

2007

Both everyday life and the entire universe are included in Anders Brinch’s works.
His expression is at once colourful, poetic and grotesque. It’s humour and seriousness, rock and roll, and reality on acid. The works contain motifs and subjects such as life and death, love and overall existence. In addition to painting, Anders Brinch works with sculptures, drawings and installations in alternative ways, bringing out new combinations, expressions and forms.

Anders Brinch received the ARKEN Travel Grant 2007 for his enormous talent in the Danish art scene today.

Jacob Fabricius

2007

Since the 1990s Jacob Fabricius has curated numerous exhibitions with international contemporary art in and outside Denmark. His many projects have significantly contributed to a diverse, dynamic and international art scene in Denmark.

Jacob Fabricius received the ARKEN Travel Grant 2007 for his entrepreneurial and experimental approach and for his independent initiative and courage to make himself available and make his opinion known in the Danish art and culture scene.