Scan Magazine | Attraction of the Month | Denmark
In the dark rooms of the Cisterns, the imagery and sound of playing children evoke a haunting sense of melancholic joy.
Attraction of the Month, Denmark
Enter a world of dreams Entering The Cisterns in Copenhagen is a bit like stepping into a parallel universe. A dark, damp shelter or a place to meet a beautiful, intriguing nightmare, the associations evoked by the old subterranean water reservoir are bountiful and varied. At the moment, the otherworldly art venue, which is part of the Frederiksberg Museums, is the scene of That Dream of Peace, an evocative video installation by Danish artist Eva Koch. By Signe Hansen | Photos: Anders Sune Berg
Underneath Søndermarken in Frederiksberg lies an astonishingly large, highceilinged space with columns, puddles and dripstones everywhere. Built in the 1850s to provide a solution for Copenhagen’s drinking water problems, the Cisterns are today an exhibition venue for contemporary art. For the last three years, the exhibitions have been created to integrate and utilise the distinctive architecture and atmosphere of the ven110 | Issue 88 | May 2016
ue. This spring, summer and autumn, the unusual exhibition space, which is also Denmark’s largest dripstone cave, is used to show That Dream of Peace by Eva Koch, an experimental Danish artist working in the fields of video installation, sound and sculpture.
Time for reflection While That Dream of Peace, like the Cisterns, might evoke different emotions
in different people, something akin to reverence seems to saturate everyone and everything in the room. With video installations projected directly onto columns, walls and water, Eva Koch has turned the underground territory into a dreamy exploration of hope and beauty in the midst of war and conflict. Made specifically for the Cisterns, the exhibition takes its point of departure in depictions of life and growth defying the terror and destruction of today’s world. In several video installations that light up the darkness of the Cisterns, children play while bombs explode, flowers sprout on muddy battlefields, and doves flutter freely in 3D projections on misty water walls. The exhibition is inspired by the artist’s immediate impression of the room, ex-