Intimacy & Publicness is a three-day public performative arts program that unfolds in and around Blågårds Plads, Nørrebro. The program explores how intimate affects—typically reserved for private relationships—might be shared and collectively experienced in public through the medium of performance art.

Inspired by cultural theorist Lauren Berlant’s concept of intimate publics, the program investigates how performance art can cultivate trust, emotional resonance, and social connection among strangers in shared urban space. What happens when intimacy becomes a collective, public experience?

Through site-specific and public performances, artists will activate Blågårds Plads and its surroundings—a square originally designed as a communal gathering place and framed by Kai Nielsen’s century-old granite sculptures of the working class. The performances engage with the site’s layered histories while exploring how contemporary urban environments can accommodate intimate encounters between different identities, communities, and narratives.

At a time when diversity and the notion of safe spaces are once again under threat, Intimacy & Publicness seeks to carve out space for queer and marginalized expressions of intimacy in the public realm. The program reimagines what it means to be together in difference, asking how art can generate new forms of belonging—temporary, affective, and collective—amid the chaos and vulnerability of urban life.

The program is curated by Joachim Aagaard Friis in collaboration with SixtyEight Art Institute, PASS – Center for Practice-based Art Studies at the University of Copenhagen, and Støberiet – Copenhagen Municipality.

Nikhil Vettukattil: Cantina: Intimations

Cantina: Intimations is a communal meal prepared and hosted by Nikhil Vettukattil. Food and poetry come together as means of cultivating intimacy in the late light of a summer evening. Drawing on research into sustainability and food cultures in the Nordic and Baltic regions—alongside techniques from Japan and the Balkans—Vettukattil centers seasonal and organic ingredients from the local landscape: peas, dandelion and elderflower, radish and new potatoes, sorrel and rye, as well as foraged preserves. The meal will be served in vessels crafted from clay sourced from Gotland.

Nikhil Vettukattil is an artist based in Oslo. He studied at Central Saint Martins in London and the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP). Recent exhibitions include DECADE (2025) at AGIT, Berlin; designofthetimes (2025) at 3236rls/Le Bourgeois, London; Defund the Police (2024) at Arcadia Missa, London; and Stipendutstilling (2024) at Oslo Kunstforening. Vettukattil is a founding member of the Institute for Scene Experiments.

Filip Vest: The Ruins

The Ruins is a fantasy musical about building another society in the ruins of the existing one. In the story, we meet a group of beings who attempt to create their own alternative community, come to terms with the violence inscribed in their bodies, develop a new language, and renegotiate the utopias of the past.

Filip Vest graduated from the Malmö Art Academy in 2021. Through performance, installation, film, and text, they investigate queer love, loneliness, and desire in the 21st century. Drawing on theatrical rehearsal processes, Vest explores how we continuously construct and negotiate our identities and the narratives we inhabit. Their work has previously been shown at venues including SMK – The National Gallery of Denmark, Roskilde Festival, Copenhagen Contemporary, Møstings, Nikolaj Kunsthal, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, MMCA Seoul, Tallinn Art Hall, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Manifesta 13, and the Gwangju Biennale.

Marina Dubia: Implication Studies Ch. II: overflow/damage/restraint

When differences meet, generation and destruction can collapse into one another: energy is pooled and transferred—it all circulates. Increase the dosage, and that exchange might erupt into chaos. Listen: I can hear the calls for restraint. But isn’t there something you, too, would like to destroy? And if containment here translates into greater violence elsewhere, should we not consider ourselves always implicated in the world’s afflictions? Give me a moment to dance through this.

Marina Dubia is alive. She acts (rehearses, operates, makes way) through visual arts, dance, and discourse. Her work focuses on directing attention toward physicality as a core of social and affective entanglement—cross-pollinating broader histories with intimate relations. Born and raised in São Paulo, Marina has lived in Copenhagen since 2018, where she studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Among other projects, in 2023 she presented the installation “The Voice of My Own Echo” and the performance “Desabar: To Fall Over” at O—Overgaden in Copenhagen. A second iteration of the latter was presented at Det Frie Felts Festival 2025 in Aarhus.

Jules Fischer: IT DOESN’T LOOK LIKE ANYTHING TO ME

The title IT DOESN’T LOOK LIKE ANYTHING TO ME references the sci-fi series Westworld, where the phrase functions as a failsafe response triggered when the hosts begin to question their own reality. In public space, too, there is an ongoing negotiation about who acts as host and who as guest. The movement material in this performance seeks out vulnerability and softness in found gestures drawn from sports, films, folk dance, and everyday life. The piece plays with ambivalence and illegibility as forms of escape from binary structures, while suggesting that the ability to question hegemony might be seen as a “natural” trait.

Jules Fischer graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2017. Their practice centers on large-scale performances and immersive experiences that engage multiple perspectives, senses, and bodies across media. Fischer’s work often explores core emotions such as love, loneliness, and grief—always through an ambivalent and queer lens. Their performances, often developed in collaboration with professional dancers and performers, have been presented at institutions including Glyptoteket, SMK, Tanzquartier Wien, and UKS in Oslo. In 2023, Fischer was awarded a three-year working grant from the Danish Arts Foundation.

Lina Hashim: The Caryatid

The Caryatid examines how the female body is shaped and perceived in public space through cultural and architectural stereotypes. Hashim draws on archetypal figures such as the Greek Caryatid, the African woman carrying water, and the belly dancer balancing a sword on her head. Each of these figures represents the body as both bearer and object—functional and sexualized. By carrying an object on her own head, Hashim activates the idea of the living caryatid, exploring how burdens and symbolic meanings intersect in the public realm.

Lina Hashim is a visual artist and performer based in Copenhagen and New York. Her practice investigates the intersections of visual culture, religious practice, gender, and migration through photography, installation, and performance. Drawing on her background as an Iraqi-born artist raised in Denmark, Hashim works with decolonial strategies and institutional critique, often activating the aesthetic and architectural legacies of Islam within contemporary art contexts. She is a graduate of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally.

Klara Lopez: Rupture

Rupture is a performance that examines the fragility of intimacy and exposure through systems of regulation. It explores the contradictions between attention and control. Blurring the boundaries between observer and observed, the piece investigates performative gestures and sound to question the body’s agency—framing it as a site where desire, visibility, and extraction intersect.

Klara Lopez is an experimental, cross-disciplinary artist working at the intersection of visual art, performance, and dance. Currently studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, her practice explores the body in relation to technology, social hierarchies, and contradiction. Through her work, she examines the tension between attraction and deviation across bodies, images, and objects—pushing the boundaries of form and perception.

Curator Joachim Aagaard Friis is a researcher, writer and curator with a Ph.D. from the Department of Visual Arts and Drama at the University of Agder, Norway. In his dissertation, he conducted practice-based curatorial research on the possibilities for more ecological and socially sustainable practices in the art field. Former positions include curator at Agder Art Center in Kristiansand, Norway, and assistant professor at the University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. Published work in journals such as Peripeti, Journal of Arts and Communities, Art/Research International, Journal of Art History, Surveillance & Society, MedieKultur, Slagmark.

SixtyEight Art Institute is a non-profit, independent art organization based in Copenhagen; an open platform for exhibitions, educational initiatives and publications in various forms, collaborating with both artist-run initiatives, larger institutions and universities. SixtyEight works both with highly discursive projects, such as research-based exhibitions and knowledge-sharing events aimed at artists and art professionals, and with art's potential as a practical, educational tool for young people through our collaborative education and learning initiatives.

PASS – Center for Practice-based Arts Studies at the University of Copenhagen is dedicated to promoting epistemic equity and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration among professionals across the art world, including museum staff, artists, curators, researchers, and educators. Funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation, the center aims to surface, articulate and critically support the multiplicity of knowledge-generating practice in the art field. PASS offers a meeting place for peer-to-peer interdisciplinary exchanges and co-training across our communities, including a unique program for doctoral and postdoctoral practice-based researchers.

Støberiet, Municipality of Copenhagen, on Blågårds Plads is a center that hosts weekly events and activities for its users, taking place in their exercise rooms, party rooms, concert rooms, meeting rooms and workshops. Støberiet prioritizes co-creation with the local communities with a wish to play an active role in the local environment, cultivate new cultural niches and make room for youth and children's culture of a high quality. They also have a special focus on creating broad and inclusive cultural experiences for and with local families with children.

KoncertKirken on Blågårds Plads is Denmark’s first Concert Church. The brainchild of Paul Ostrup, director of LiteraturHaus, and Björn Ross, artistic director of the Copenhagen Renaissance Music Festival, KoncertKirken opened in October 2009. Since then, it has become a vibrant cultural venue for local, national, and international music lovers, as well as a hub for Danish and international musicians and artists.

Artists: Nikhil Vettukattil, Filip Vest, Marina Dubia, Jules Fischer, Lina Hashim, Klara Lopez
Curator: Joachim Aagaard Friis
Producer: Katinka Saarnak
Graphic design: Filip Grønning

The project received generous support from Augustinus Fonden, Statens Kunstfond, Ny Carlsbergfondet, Louis Hansen Fonden, Dansk Tennis Fond, Rådet for Visuel Kunst Københavns Kommune, and the Office for Contemporary Art Norway.