SUPERFLEX present Foreigners, Please Don’t Leave Us Alone With The Danes! at the Biennale Arte 2024 in Venice

The theme of the Biennale Arte 2024 is Foreigners Everywhere, a suggestion that every place is filled with foreigners, and that we are all foreigners. Curated by Adriano Pedrosa, the exhibition focuses on artists who are foreigners, immigrants, refugees, or part of diasporic communities. It is in this context that SUPERFLEX was invited to reimagine their work, Foreigners, Please Don’t Leave Us Alone With The Danes!

In 2002, posters with the words “FOREIGNERS, PLEASE DON’T LEAVE US ALONE WITH THE DANES!” were put up in the streets of Copenhagen as a comment on the increasingly reactionary immigration politics in Denmark. The phrase was an adaptation of French graffiti from the 80s, retooled for a Danish context. During the Danish EU Presidency in 2002, Denmark’s immigration policies also became a pointof interest and discussion in the international press. The poster has since been widely presented in Denmark and abroad, including in exhibitions as a wall painting, and as a stack of free posters. Recognizing that political posters were often drowned out by the visual noise of the city, SUPERFLEX printed the text on an orange background, the color of an alert, so that it stands out in public space.

The message still resonates within the contemporary Danish political climate, especially in light of the fact that Denmark’s anti-immigration politics have continued to escalate, inspiring similar policies in other EU countries. In retrospect, Danish immigration polices seem like an avant-garde of xenophobic policy-making: today, all over Europe, parties on both the right and left run on platforms which stoke anti-immigrant sentiment and promise more closed borders.

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On January 20, SUPERFLEX’s exhibition Beyond the End of the World opens at ICA San Diego. 

In one room, the titular filmwork depicts a possible future in which water has overtaken infrastructure. The film takes place in a cavernous, abandoned, and flooded building where new forms of life are bubbling up from the aquatic realm. 

In another room, SUPERFLEX presents a series of new sculptures related to the film, unburnt clay copies of sanitary equipment from the bathroom of the secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Humans’ ingenious hygienic inventions have been given a second life in clay: a delicate, brittle material that will soon return to earth.

Support for Beyond the End of the World provided by the Danish Arts Foundation, Jack Kirkland, and OMR. 

One Two Three Swing!, installed in Dorasan Station, has been donated to the care of the Ministry of Unification by the Jamil Collection, Jacob Wandt, Christian Just Linde, Lars-Erik Houmann Christensen, and Steen Bakmann.
One Two Three Swing! by SUPERFLEX was originally conceived for Hyundai Commission 2017, Tate Modern Turbine Hall, 2017. One Two Three Swing! was developed in close collaboration with KWY.studio.

Vertical Migration creates an intimate encounter with a siphonophore, a jellyfish-like life form that bears no resemblance to human beings. Because of sea-level rise, humans will also be migrating vertically in the coming centuries, to higher elevations and raised buildings. The siphonophore’s story is our story.

In 2017, SUPERFLEX began a five-year project at Kunsthaus Graz. During this period, one work has been installed in the space each year, all addressing the fetishization of money, the collapse of value, and the economic conditions that constrain cultural institutions.

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In anticipation of a future altered by climate change, we must prepare our environment for a migration of the sea onto land. Dive-In is an encounter across time, elements, and species, constructing an architectural vocabulary fit for a new era of submersion – an era of fish.

Dive-In was originally commissioned by Desert X in collaboration TBA21–Academy with music composed by Dark Morph (Jónsi and Carl Michael von Hausswolff).

The Corrupt Show and the Speculative Machine divided SUPERFLEX’s work into four structural cores: intellectual property, films, legal contracts, and works that involve people in public contexts.

The project consisted of two parts: the first, The Corrupt Show, was made up of 58 works displayed in the exhibition space and included newly made pieces as well as earlier projects. The second part, The Speculative Machine, was conceived as a series of discussions with experts from different fields such as politics, education, and culture. These discussions were held during the run of the exhibition in different places in Mexico City.