Hosting Lands is a collaborative exhibition movement that bridges existing communities or collectives to exchange knowledge, redistribute resources, and provide infrastructural support through artistic and curatorial labour. It works through long-term engagements with people and places already practicing alternative ways of living, working, and self-organizing within the ruins of late colonial capitalism. Rather than extract, appropriate, or merely represent, Hosting Lands seeks to amplify, sustain, and contribute to these ongoing efforts. It recognizes that knowledge is embedded in place, tradition, and struggle.

The project unfolds across different mostly rural sites, in Denmark and beyond, collaborating with both local and international artists, activists, and communities. Through this, it seeks to explore how we can collectively care for land in ways that are regenerative, commoned, and attuned to the complexity of our ecological and political moment.

Hosting Lands is anchored in real sites, communities, and landscapes. It insists on the importance of situatedness, of rooting attention and care in the specificity of place. But it also challenges the limitations of a purely local framing. While our struggles are grounded and particular, they do not (and should not) end with the local. We refuse pastoral localism. We reject the tendency to concentrate environmental, emotional, and political concern solely on our own (national) backyards. Instead, Hosting Lands moves through connections across borders, weaving trans-local solidarities and networks of shared resistance within our entangled struggles, as artist and comrade Dharmendra Prasad has phrased it.

Hosting Lands is both an experiment and a critique. It is an attempt to reimagine the usual modes of production within the (Western) art world. It proposes forms of radical bridgework between art and community practices engaged in land politics and environmental justice. It invites us to inhabit artistic spaces as architectures of everyday life, not as isolated gestures but as part of ongoing processes of transformation and care.

Above all, Hosting Lands is a hesitant, sometimes bewildered attempt to make artistic and curatorial practices meaningful amid intersecting genocides and ecocides. It emerges from grief, anger, pain, and guilt, from a world built on ruins and injustice, and asks how we might reach toward each other. Not from purity, but from responsibility. Not from hope, but from conviction and commitment. Yet it also emerges from tenderness, friendship, and the quiet joy of doing things together, from the belief that even within collapse, gestures of care and collective imagination do matter. As artist and comrade Cassie Thornton says: “It’s too late. Do it anyway.”

Hosting Lands is curated by Dea Antonsen, Ida Bencke, and Aziza Harmel.

Hosting Lands is supported by

The Bikuben Foundation,
Vision Exhibition Award

Globus Call

Nordisk Kulturfond

Danish Arts Foundation

Spar Nord Fonden

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