About CAMP
“CAMP has developed into an artistic space for everyone, who wants to learn from and meet those people our society has a hard time including.
– Matthias Hvass Borello, art critic”
CAMP was a nonprofit exhibition space for art discussing questions of displacement, migration, immigration, and asylum. The center was operative from 2015–2020 and was located in Trampoline House, an independent community center in Copenhagen that provides refugees, asylum seekers, and ethnic minority Danes in Denmark with a place of support, community, and purpose.
CAMP produced exhibitions, events, publications, and education programs about migration and the questions this phenomena gives rise to today. The center worked with renowned international artists as well as less established practitioners, most with refugee or migrant experience, and gained international recognition for breaking new ground in exhibiting and communicating art that makes the human and societal challenges posed by migration present and relatable.
CAMP took its point of departure in the fact that more people than ever before are displaced from their homes because of climate change, war, conflict, persecution, and poverty. The center worked to increase insight into the life situations of displaced and migrant persons, and to discuss these in relation to the overall factors that cause displacement and migration. The objective was, through art, to stimulate greater understanding between displaced people and the communities that receive them – and to stimulate new visions for a more inclusive and equitable migration, refugee, and asylum policy.
CAMP was the first center of its kind in Scandinavia and was directed as a self-governing institution by Danish curators Frederikke Hansen and Tone Olaf Nielsen, who also founded the center in 2015. The center’s name referred to the nation-state’s perhaps most extreme responses to human migration: the refugee camp, the asylum center, and the detention center.
CAMP was realized with support from private sponsors and the following foundations and associations:
Det Obelske Familiefond / Statens Kunstfond / Foreningen Roskilde Festival
Images 16 / European Cultural Foundation / Københavns Billedkunstudvalg / Knud Højgaards Fond
Migrationspolitisk Pulje / Bispebjerg Lokaludvalg / BKF – Billedkunstnernes Forbund / Københavns Kommune: Kultur- og Fritidsudvalget / Susi og Peter Robinsohns Fond
