Invitations Please
No previous funding required. No experience required. No deadline. A letter of invitation is all that is needed.
This open call offers project spaces, artist-run rooms and institutions at the edge of the art world, or outside it altogether, a unique opportunity: to invite the artist Kristoffer Ørum to exhibit with you. Kiosk windows, stairwells, storage units, hospital corridors, library basements, buses, forests, windowsills and websites with very few visitors are all eligible to apply, and so is anything not on that list. Run-down institutions, renegade curators and first-time gallerists are particularly encouraged to apply. No power and no experience? No worries. He has managed before. No funds and no audience? Don't worry. He is used to it.
You do not need a budget to invite him. What he needs from you is a short letter of invitation, on paper or by e-mail, naming the space, the dates and what you can provide. He will use your letter of invitation to apply elsewhere for the fee, the production and the travel. If the funding comes through, the show costs the space little or nothing. If it does not, the work is made with what there is.
Is my space eligible?
Yes. There is no kind of space this excludes, and the questions below are examples rather than conditions. Do you have a small project space? A screen in the lobby of your building? A shop window between tenants? A noticeboard, a waiting room, a lift, a spare wall in a canteen? All of them are eligible. Are you starting a new gallery, and would like something that attracts attention even if it is not commercially viable? He specialises in that. Are you confused about technology, but would like to seem as if you know? He can help with that. Would you like to leave everything to him except the invitation? That is fine. A conference that needs a performative lecture? No problem. Do you need text-based works, sculptures, video or an installation? He makes all of them. Do you want trouble and weird questions? Those too. Are you looking for over-ambitious DIY projects? That is most of what he does. Now is your chance to add to the ever-growing list of marginal spaces he has already exhibited in.
Kristoffer's work has been shown in places like these far more often than in commercial galleries, which is where he has shown least.
Not running an arts space yet? You could start one by showing Kristoffer: one artist, one show, in a room, a window or a corner you already have. He has run one himself, Captive Portal in Copenhagen, since 2014, and knows how little it takes to begin.
Why he is asking
A few years ago Kristoffer Ørum was very busy, with one show following another. It is quieter now. That is why he is asking.
Kristoffer is fifty, and in practice still an emerging artist, as he has been for twenty years: emerging, receding, emerging again.
In those twenty years he has shown in museums and kunsthals, and sat on the boards of art institutions. The work travels: New York, Boston, Vancouver, San Francisco, London, Riga, Krakow and Oberhausen, as well as Copenhagen and Aarhus.
He also wants the freedom to make something for a room, and for the people who come into it. Small and unusual places allow that.
Kristoffer enjoys the relative freedom and obscurity of being marginal in many ways. The edges of the art world are where most of his work has happened and where he would like it to go on happening. But being marginal is not free even if it is low resource, and to continue he needs some resources from the art world as well: money, time, materials, and the kind of invitation a funder would recognise.
Some version of this is true of most artists. Work comes in waves and then stops, for reasons that have little to do with the work.
Why an invitation matters even without money
Kristoffer needs invitations in order to apply for funding. Most of the funds that pay for making and showing art will only consider an application that names a place and a time, so a work that has not been invited somewhere cannot be funded, and a work that cannot be funded is hard to make.
In his experience a basement in New York is easier to get funding for than a show in a smaller Danish town. Both are welcome.
The fee obtained from a letter of invitation might let him hire someone to mind Captive Portal, an assistant, or make an impractical work. Almost every krone invested in him goes back into the art world.
What he can bring
- An existing work from the archive, adapted to the space.
- A new work made for the space and its circumstances.
- A large installation, or a permanent sculpture.
- A giant 3D-printed oyster that people could live in.
- A public commission, or a work for public television.
- A lecture performance, a talk or a reading.
- A lecture by a former shipyard worker who sees the city at the wrong scale.
- A work made from the place itself: its history, its rumours, its plants and animals, the people who use it.
- A history of your town, rewritten by a computer in real time.
- A net art work, for a space that exists only online or for one that wants a website, a feed or a page of its own.
- A net art work that is local: a wireless network that can only be reached in the room, so that the internet becomes a thing you have to be in a particular place to see.
- Crayfish carrying the names of wireless networks.
- A video, a sound piece or a single-page web work for a screen, a speaker or a browser.
- A workshop for a school, a museum, a folk high school or a group of students, or a mentorship.
- A guided tour, on foot or by bike.
- A creature that roams your forest at dusk.
- A game: a board game, a web game, an app or a live-action role-play.
- Generative text, or software that writes, sorts or misreads.
- A webcam filter that puts a president's face on yours.
- A 3D animation.
- A mask, a wearable or a costume.
- An audio guide.
- A karaoke video.
- A monument to a fictional past, or the fragments of one.
- A ray for cosmic carrots, invented by a fictional scientist.
- A book, a guide for future tourists, a catalogue text or an essay.
- A public event.
- A labyrinth of cardboard boxes, with a weather experiment in a coffee maker.
- A collaboration with another artist, or a group show he puts together.
- A magic trick, with a magician.
- A kiosk of small objects for sale.
- Something small enough to arrive in an envelope.
- Et cetera.
Role-players, invasive species, noses, AI, or whatever your theme is this year: he is happy to oblige, and will try to find the margins of whatever you propose.
What happens next
Kristoffer will read every invitation and answer each of them personally. He has a hard time imagining a space he would refuse, but perhaps you can surprise him. Funding takes time, and it is often refused. A show may end up smaller than planned, but even if he does not manage to get any funding he will deliver something, because that is the arrangement. It may not be the giant oyster.
He is also always happy to accept unfunded invitations at short notice, and to be the extra artist invited because someone cancelled. Don't be shy.
Where an invitation is accepted, the show is added to this archive like any other work, with its place and dates.
Now is the time to ask. He is not busy, and will probably spend far too much time on whatever he is invited to do.
Invite Kristoffer Ørum
There are no requirements. If it helps, a short message might say what the space is, where it is, how large it is, who usually comes, when you imagine the show taking place, and what you can offer in money, materials, help or hospitality. Photographs of the space are welcome. So is a description of what is already happening there, and of anything that cannot be changed.
A fee and a production budget are welcome, but their absence is not a reason not to write. Say what there is, and the funding applications can be built around it.
Write to
There is no deadline, though dates at least six months ahead are easiest to fund.
Kristoffer Ørum reads every invitation and answers each one personally.