Newly acquired plot of land at nivå station
Danh Vo presents
With the support of the Obel Family Foundation, The Nivaagaard Collection has bought and taken over a plot of land at Nivå Station, 800 metres from the museum. With the newly acquired plot, put up for sale by DSB, the museum anchors its footing in the town – not with a traditional sculpture, but with a piece of land that will change over time.
The plot is 690 m2. Here, the Danish-Vietnamese artist Danh Vo, with whom The Nivaagaard Collection began a collaboration last year, gets free rein to create a garden over time under the auspices of the project ‘Danh Vo presents’. Throughout history, many artists and groups of artists have admired the garden and its joys, but Danh Vo is not going to use his garden as a subject, he is not going to paint it. Something else is at stake for Vo: A garden is a way of thinking, a way of being in the world, which in many ways contrasts with the breathtaking international life of exhibitions he has lived for many years.
Danh Vo says:
Det er virkelig inspirerende, at Nivaagaards Malerisamling har købt denne grund og kastet sig ud i en ny og eksperimenterende kunstform, hvor ingen af os helt ved, hvor projektet ender. Jeg har sjældent oplevet noget så radikalt i min karriere, og jeg glæder mig til at lytte til stedet og se, hvad der gror frem på alle måder. Der findes ikke en smukkere skulptur end en have.
You can not rush a sprout
A garden can be a place of cultivation, recreation, contemplation. You can meet and be together in a garden, or you can sit for a while and immerse yourself. When working with a garden, one must surrender to a slower pace. You can not rush a sprout and the garden must be tended to, watered and cared for in accordance with the given circumstances. In a poetic and subtle way, gardening is the opposite of hectic and result-oriented, which often characterizes our modern life.
Museums and artists usually collaborate within a tight timeline and with many deadlines. In the garden on the newly acquired plot, a different timeline will prevail, there are no set plans or goals in mind here. By creating a garden together, the museum and the artist have sown a seed for a different way of doing things.
Museum director Andrea Rygg Karberg says:
When you see Danh Vo work in the nature around his studio in Güldenhof outside Berlin, the understanding of his art and work process, which has an organic growth, increases. Nature means more and more to Vo in his art and life, as for the rest of us, and the garden here is both an artistic and ideological experiment of the times.
The garden is our gift to Nivå, which will help to create innovative, green and artistic experiences along the Kystbanen (The Coast Line). With our ongoing climate renovation, The Nivaagaard Collection enters a new era with a green museum profile, where it is also the museum’s desire to communicate and live up to ‘sustainability’ as a world goal in the best possible way. It is a great pleasure for the museum to have this satellite at the station, which speaks to the history and identity of the Collection, which is deeply rooted in Nivå – and vice versa.
