Drain the Öresund 

The exhibition “Drain the Öresund” brings together artists living on both sides of the bridge, and examines the region as a site of socio-cultural, ecological, technological, economic, and political entanglements at local and global levels. Key to the exhibition is a critical view of infrastructure, the production of interrelated systems and ‘bridges’ that facilitate exchanges over space and the transfer of information between different domains.

In 1953, the Scanian industrialist Ruben Rausing made a preposterous proposal: drain the Öresund, thereby providing new space for Malmo and Copenhagen to expand and meet in the middle. As the founder of the Swedish liquid food packaging company Tetra Pak, Rausing saw the seabed of this borderland as a site for development, manufacturing new territory for agricultural and urbanization projects, and establishing contact across previous divides. This idea of Rausing has been the starting point for the curator of the exhibition, Post Brothers, and leading up to the exhibition title. 

The exhibition explores the hopes and failures of the massive societal transformation, delving into the relationships between the public and private, the inner and outer worlds, as well as between images, abstractions, and lived reality. It also examines how human labor shapes and alters our surroundings, and the impact this, in turn, has on our identities and relationships.

The exhibition is made with support from the Polish Institute and the Danish Arts Foundation