LILITH constructs visual worlds through intuitive, collage-like processes involving performance, film, text, sound, and sculptural installations. The starting point for their work is often linked to inner human states and drives, exploring the structures of rituals and ceremonies we follow in order to function and be accepted as part of a group. The concept of ritual has long preoccupied the duo, as it permeates many of the agreed-upon rules we use to build meaning and belonging during dramatic life events—or simply to create shared understanding in everyday life—such as the rules in games, play, and all forms of staged presentation.

For CHART 2025, LILITH Artis Duo premiered the performance I AM EXTREME. In this piece, the audience witnesses a group of people in a procession carrying a vastly oversized arm, while performing ritual tributes to the physical and psychological variations and imperfections of our bodies. As part of these rites, a newly composed opera piece was performed.

Credits:

Concept/Artists: LILITH artist duo (Elin Lundgren & Petter Pettersson)

Composer: Philip Gleisner

Opera Soloist: Angelica Asp

Performers: Angelica Asp, Daniel Mårs, Dragan Samajovic, Elin Lundgren, Erik Wall, Faïka Ammar, Finon Alkabawi, Gisel Munir Escobar, Inna Pettersson-Lundgren, Irene Stenberg, Jacob Skarehag, Johan Rastenberger, Kim Holm, Lo Lundgren, Louise Zurawski, Siri Hedlund, Susanne Larsdotter, Thomas

Photo by Joachim Munch, Barsk Projects

Anabolic Spectacle is a text-based solo performance that draws inspiration from the language of men’s online magazines, transforming their words into feverish dream scenarios of a violent quest for self-mastery over the body.

It seeks to articulate a labyrinthe of fantasies, restless nights and the impact of the categorical gaze on a non-normative body, comparing the audience’s gaze to the scrutinizing stares in public spaces.

The performance sees the transmasculine body as an incompatible territory for hegemonic masculine narratives – a realm where the capitalist ideals of the optimized self begin to crumble. Anabolic Spectacle is a collaborative creation between performance artist Teo Ala-Ruona and dramaturg Even Minn.

Concept, text and performance: Teo Ala-Ruona
Dramaturgy: Even Minn
Production: CHART Art Fair, Teo Ala-Ruona
Premiere: CHART Art Fair, Copenhagen, August 2024
Supported by: Kone Foundation

Photo by Joakim Züger, Barsk Projects

Magga Bjarnadóttir is an Icelandic artist and choreographer who works at the intersection of dance, performance, visual arts and literature. Her diverse practice includes choreography, performance, photography and video, text pieces, writing, drawing and cutting glass objects.

For the Performance Programme at CHART 2024, Magga Bjarnadóttir performed ‘PEOPLE PLEASE.’ During the performance, a group of people walked around Kongens Nytorv with protest signs that had text pieces by the artists written on them. Unlike protest signs, which normally aim to be clear and direct and not open to misunderstanding, here, the messages are deliberately left open and ambiguous.

Photo by Joakim Züger, Barsk Projects

Kunstteater is a performance-based, cross-disciplinary project founded in 2018 by Danish artist Mathias Dyhr. Central to Dyhr's work in Kunstteater are experiments with spatial and durational formats within art institutions, theatres and public space, as well as his many collaborations with a broad variety of professionals from different artistic fields.

For the Performance Programme at CHART 2024, Kunstteater's three-meter-tall stilt character, the infant dandy 'Baby' played by circus performer Michiel Tange van Leewen strolled around the grounds of Charlottenborg and Kongens Nytorv in the performance Sunday Afternoon especially created for CHART 2024.

Photo by Joakim Züger, Barsk Projects

Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen’s praxis is based on performativity and performance art, transformed, and translated into different medias. The productions involve the body and scripted texts. She gathers, adapts and universalizes her narratives in both a critical and humorous approach regarding issues such as identity, culture and social relations and constellations.

For the Performance Programme at CHART 2024, Rasmussen performed ‘Afraid of ME’. In this performance, the audience will encounter a middle-aged woman, all dressed up and supposedly from the art industry, standing with handwritten signs in public space around Charlottenborg. The sentences are direct, some quite personal, though open for interpretation. Distancing herself from the art fair, she is trying to catch attention, while sending out mixed signals and creating an awkward situation….

‘Afraid of ME’ was originally created for VIVAAR Venezia performance in public space during the Venice Biennale 2024 and repurposed for CHART.

Photo by Joakim Züger, Barsk Projects

During his residency with Live Art Danmark, which we facilitated in collaboration with Copenhagen Contemporary, performance artist Francis Patrick Brody developed and presented a series of games, and audiences were invited to play. Due to the ignorance of the gamesmaster, Francis himself, who refused to provide a set of rules or any other explanations on how his games were to be played, the players had to figure out the course of the game, rules and moves of the intricately designed stones across several boards, aims, goals, and final outcome. This forced the players to interact and communicate in unforeseen ways and opened up new, unexpected spaces for interaction.

A new performative game, Untitled (Three angry men, an ant, a grasshopper and a honeybee walk into a bar), was developed for CHART 2023 and the art fair’s surroundings, inviting bystanders to sit down and play.

Photo by Niklas Adrian Vindelev, Barsk Projects

For CHART 2023, Mads Lynnerup presented a text-based performance, pushing a large plywood wheel through the city centre — Kongens Nytorv and Nyhavn. The wheel featured the words “WORK” and “MORE”, forming the shifting phrases “WORK MORE” or “MORE WORK” depending on its rotation. Mads Lynnerup’s practice incorporates video, performance, sculpture, and installation, and is influenced by societal and economic issues. His work offers a playful commentary on everyday experiences as well as tendencies and trends within the art world.

Photo by Niklas Adrian Vindelev, Barsk Projects

Flower Drop is a performance by Molly Haslund that she first showed in June 2021 during the Den Frie Morgen (the Free Morning). 

Molly Haslund (b. 1976) works across media and strategies. From performance to sculpture to music and text, Molly Haslund examines how we as individuals relate to each other and how physical surroundings, situations, norms, hierarchies and body language affect us as people.

Wearing a grey suit, Haslund walks through the morning traffic carrying a giant bouquet of flowers – sunflowers, peonies and lilies. She walks across the pedestrian crossings and along the sidewalks, concentrating as she goes on holding the bouquet of flowers, which has a certain weight and a size that practically hides her shoulders and face. The colourful flowers attract the attention of surrounding pedestrians and cyclists. Occasionally she drops a single flower and walks on as if she hasn't noticed. Kind souls, even in traffic, stop, pick up the flower and run after the woman with the large bouquet to give her the lost flower back.

In gratitude, they are offered to keep the flower, and the day can go on, after this unexpected moment of mutual kindness, on their way through the city to work, classes, meetings, appointments and shopping, now with a flower as a memento. The work is about the joy of helping and giving. And about receiving an unexpected gift.

Completely uncultivated in the world of flowers itself is the phenomenon of 'flower drop', which in Danish is covered by a single and rarely seen metaphorical word 'blomstringsdråbe'. 'Blomstringsdråbe' and 'flower drop' describe the fleeting movement that occurs when flowers or buds that look healthy and well-developed suddenly, and immediately, inexplicably, fall off the plant either in clusters or one by one.

Photo by Niklas Adrian Vindelev, Barsk Projects

For CHART 2023, Hannah Toticki performed Longing for Common Closeness. Nowadays, not only work but also the social distancing measures overwhelm our nervous system. The movement research Longing for Common Closeness materialised the internalised measures of social distancing: the performers’ costumes made the invisible distance visible, playing haptically with the commandment to keep distance from fellow human beings.

Photo by Joakim Züger, Narsk Projects