On Friday 23 September Marie Kølbæk Iversen will perform a selection of folksongs as part of her music project Donnimaar. The songs will be performed on the autumn equinox at sundown inside Kølbæk Iversen’s exhibition Histories of Predation. For this event Kølbæk Iversen activates subjugated folksongs about merpeople from her East Atlantic home region of Western Jutland. In this way she creates a new contextual and sensuous backdrop for the installation that takes its departure from microscopic recordings of the eye lens nuclei of the gurry shark, a deep-sea fish also known as the Greenland shark and in Danish originally named “havkal”, meaning merman. The songs performed will be recorded and later released digitally by MoBC Records with the title Donnimaar. O Tilli.

Donnimaar is an ongoing music project based on 19th-century folklore collector Evald Tang Kristensen’s collection of songs, including those from Kølbæk Iversen’s great-great-great-great- grandmother Johanne Thygesdatter, who was one of Tang Kristensen’s informants, representing a disappearing commons-based culture. Donnimaar. O Tilli will be the second volume in the project. The first is called Donnimaar. Vredens Børn and was released in March 2022.

The performance is part of Marie Kølbæk Iversen’s exhibition Histories of Predation at O—Overgaden (27 August - 23 October). Read more about it here