Competition is heating up over who will build and run a permanent art centre—or ‘kunsthal’—on Copenhagen’s Paper Island—a popular harbourside location in the Danish capital famous for its street food.
The frontrunners include the Copenhagen art dealer Nicolai Wallner and the local architect Kristoffer Lindhardt Weiss, who have co-founded the consultancy Wallner Weiss, and Copenhagen Contemporary, a privately run institution that opened in a newly refurbished warehouse on the island on 25 August. The space was inaugurated with a show of large-scale installations and videos by Bruce Nauman and Ragnar Kjartansson, among others.
Copenhagen Contemporary, which is funded by private donors including the Faurschou Foundation and the Augustinus Foundation, is due to stay open for the next 18 months, after which Paper Island is slated for redevelopment. According to a spokeswoman for the City of Copenhagen, “no concrete agreement” has been made about who will get to build a permanent kunsthal in its place.
On 23 June, the culture and leisure committee decided that the new exhibition space should occupy around 4,000 sq. m of a 10,000 sq. m centre that will also incorporate a swimming pool. However, the budget for the proposed kunsthal will not be decided until the next financial year.
Wallner and Weiss’s proposal was specifically referred to during the 23 June meeting. “[The] vision, budget and design of the project is expected to follow the presentation from Wallner Weiss,” the committee says in its minutes. Their plan is to create an “accessible and informal” space that mimics the “rawness” of Paper Island as it currently stands, Weiss says. “Our concept is based more on performance; it will be a space for interdisciplinary projects.”
Jannie Haagemann, the senior curator at Copenhagen Contemporary, says its plans to build a kunsthal are “still in the mix”. She says: “We are still in dialogue with the politicians at the City of Copenhagen—a dialogue that has been going on for two-and-a-half years.”
Haagemann also says that a third party is interested in creating an art centre on Paper Island: a new, city-owned institution called History & Art. The spokeswoman for the City of Copenhagen declined to comment on this point.