Sydhavn Never Surrenders (Sydhavn overgiver sig aldrig)
Details3
- Date
- 6 Oct 2026
- Tags
- events, projects
Sydhavn Never Surrenders (Sydhavn overgiver sig aldrig) 2,092 photographs, 212 exhibitions, 2027–2053, Sydhavn Station, Copenhagen
From the venue's own archive: 212 real exhibitions in the old ticket office, 2012 to 2026, each answered by an invented one.
The whole archive, all 212 exhibitions with text and images: oerum.org/sydhavn
None of them happened. They sit in a future where the S-train has stopped running and the city around it has moved away. The station itself is lived in, farmed and used.
Sydhavn Never Surrenders is an optimistic story about the staying power of artist-run spaces: this place gets by because people keep making things together.
All 2,092 images in order, 102 seconds. 2027 is grey and empty, 2053 has paint on every surface, green through the windows and a party on the floor. Each year holds a moment on its first image. The sound is a projector, one click per image change, resting when the picture rests.
The archive is shown as 214 printed index cards in a container on the wall in the group exhibition Ind med 4 toget at Udstillingsstedet Sydhavn Station, Copenhagen, 16 Oct to 15 Nov 2026. Opening 16 Oct, 17.00 to 20.00; open Thursday to Sunday, 13.00 to 17.00. It is the first show in Copenhagen by Kunstnersammenslutningen Jylland since the association was founded in 1978 - 30 artists - and my first since I joined last year. The title of the show is the old Copenhagen phrase for someone arriving green from the provinces on the four o'clock train. More about the association: ksjylland.dk The venue itself: sydhavnstation.info
At the centre of the show stands a large diorama where model trains run through a landscape built out of artworks, carrying small works with them. A 3D-printed Sydhavn Station stands in it, as it looks in the archive: grown over. The train runs past it like any other station on the line. In the old DSB poster frieze and on the billboard hangs a collage of postcards the artists sent home over the summer of 2026 - some arrived, some came back - and mine is sent from a place that does not exist.
The site is up now, ten days before the show opens, and comes down when it closes.
Technical: the texts are written by Qwen2.5-14B, fine-tuned with a LoRA on the venue's own archive of 212 exhibition texts. The images are made with FLUX.2 [klein] 9B and a LoRA trained on the venue's own 2,093 photographs; each image takes its geometry from a real documentation photo through a depth map, so the room is the same while everything else is invented. The 3D model is converted from an image the same way. All of it runs locally on one graphics card with open weight models, on wind power. The music is generated locally in the same way.
My work is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation. The exhibition is supported by Poul Johansen Fonden, Lizzi og Mogens Staal Fonden, Kgs. Enghave Lokaludvalg and the City of Copenhagen. Posters and billboard are supported by 15. Juni Fonden through Sydhavn Station.