SixtyEight Art Institute is a non-profit art institute which focuses on giving young artistic and curatorial talents the opportunity to imagine and present new exhibition-making possibilities, and asks how these can intersect with other institutions and organisations. The institute is dedicated to strengthening the independent and practical approach to artistic production through its programme and the events at our physical exhibition space for contemporary art in the centre of Copenhagen. The institute dedicates one or two months of its annual programme to exhibitions planned by external curators and artists, which are supplemented by a public programme, seminars and publications with peers and scholars connected to the research topics and agendas in the exhibition programme. SixtyEight Art Institute’s programme for 2016 – 2017 aims to consider the connections between Nordic, European and International developments within curatorial and artistic research and how these intersect with contemporary sociology, science, literature and philosophy. SixtyEight Art Institute is an intimate space, both in terms of the way audiences meet with art and the ideas it generates, and in the way the institute works closely with partners and focuses on co- productions. SixtyEight’s main focus is to continue forging links between International, European, and Nordic Region art production. With this in mind (and at a fundamental level) SixtyEight Art Institute will be working as an independent space dedicated to making a difference to and having an impact on issues of diversity, creative exchange and artistic development. SixtyEight is run by Iben Bach Elmstrøm and Christopher Sand-Iversen. Director/Curator Iben holds a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Sir Cass and an MFA in Curating from Goldsmith's University. Curator/Writer Christopher studied a BA in Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art and an MA in Visual Culture at the University of Copenhagen. History SixtyEight Art Institute was established as 68 Square Metres in a paint factory from the 1940s, which had been given to cultural entrepreneurs and small creative business for a number of years. We created an exhibition space in an old laboratory within the existing industrial structure, which was part of a dynamic group of artists, musicians, designers, event organisers, and urban gardeners. Together we brought a new set of possibilities and cultural activities to the area. We were at the same time part of a movement of exhibition spaces and commercial galleries to the East Amager quarter of Copenhagen, and took the opportunity to initiate and organise a coordination of the galleries and cultural activities in the neighbourhood through a concept called First Fridays. The aim was to promote the visibility of and access to the more remote locations in the industrial neighbourhood. SixtyEight has now moved to the centre of Copenhagen, to a listed building which has a rich history of artistic craft, having been built in 1732 for goldsmith Melchior Frederik Zeise. Here we will continue our aim of bringing the most interesting Danish artists together with those from abroad. SixtyEight Art Institute is supported by Copenhagen art Council Statens Kunstfond

SixtyEight Art Institute is a small research based institute located in central Copenhagen, working on stimulating the synergies between independent artists and curators to challenges new forms of exhibitions making. The institute invites artists and curators from all over the world to work with their peers from the Scandinavian context. The institute is formed to challenges how exhibition making can function as conceptual aesthetically reflexivity on our contemporary societies and politically complexities.
SixtyEight Art Institute would like to use a small presentation booth at Supermarket 2017 for creating a press style release for imagining artistic and curatorial projects between different peers present at the fair. We believe that exhibitions can functions as research positions, critical reflections, or thesis on contemporary mechanisms of representation and systems of power, ethical and social constellations and as spaces for producing other realities. Today, the effort from young art practitioners to initiate exhibitions, demands working over hours - without getting paid, heavily and strict managerial control, negotiating between politicians, states representatives, city councils and selection committees, leaving little time and perhaps liberty, to risk an experimental and radical exhibition making. The historical legacy of radical exhibition making are easily found in the archives of dada, fluxus art and conceptual art, but bear less visible and perceptual traces into our current ‘extended moment’ of contemporary art and its exhibition forms. By proposing a paper based platform for thinking, debating and experimenting with how exhibitions can provoke new refleksion over art's relationship to its public, SixtyEight aim to foster and situate new exhibitions imaginations, between younger independent artists and curators outside of academic, institutional or commercial market structures. The papers are functioning both as a playing, thinking, debating device for exercising the potential of the forms and structures of art.