UNDERCOVER – The Library as a Physical Narrative

Hotel Pro Forma

First we had multi-artist Robert Wilson, now we have Hotel Pro Forma. For the second time at the Royal Library our cultural heritage is being affectionately treated by prominent artists in a new major exhibition. The exhibition UNDERCOVER, staged by Hotel Pro Forma, uncover and reveal selected works from the Royal Library’s impressive collections.

Hotel Pro Forma and Kirsten Dehlholm, who are celebrating their 25 year anniversary, have been exploring the Royal Library unimaginable volumes of books, pictures and works that reflect centuries cultural proccution. The artist's have walked in this fascinating landscape of knowledge, documentation, expressive power and ideology.

The Royal Library contains substance and thought in a multitude of physical forms, from the country’s smallest almanacs to gigantic reference works and indexes on just about everything. Here one can find cultural-historical beacons of tremendous beauty and insight, but also quite banal pamphlets for general door-to-door distribution. High and low, wide and narrow, all collected and preserved for the present and for posterity. Here everything becomes valuable as evidence of how it was, how it is and perhaps also how it will be in the future.

UNDERCOVER is an exhibition about the library as a fundamental, all-encompassing knowledge organism, where the particular and the common, the sublime and the profane act together on the same stage. The works open up to the spectator on new premisses in a dialogue between the library’s departments right across time, typification, way of thinking and the world of art.

Over 25 years the theatre and performance group Hotel Pro Forma has created exhibitions and performances that put phenomena and situations into new contexts in a sensuous examination of the world. Hotel Pro Forma works with hybrid forms across genres within the world of theatre, opera and music and combines architecture, pictorial art, film, lighting design and technology.

Hotel Pro Forma was established by visual artist Kirsten Dehlholm in 1985 as a continuation of Billedstofteater (1977-1985). Based on visual artistic expression and with a great feeling for pictorial art, performance and space Kirsten Dehlholm and Hotel Pro Forma have made their mark, also internationally, as a unique innovator of dramatic art.

The exhibition is supported by Knud Højgaards Fond, Konsul George Jorck og hustru Emma Jorcks Fond, Farumgaard-Fonden og Danmarks Nationalbanks Jubilæumsfond af 1968. Hotel Pro Forma is supported by Statens Kunstråds Scenekunstudvalg.