Visit the immersive exhibition Fire We Gather Around, featuring installations and sculptures throughout the landscape, in a barn, in an office housed in a former pigsty, and in a former sawmill space. The exhibition revolves around questions of land care, collectivity, and environmental justice. It explores how art can play an active role in renegotiating our world in the current complexity of our ecological, social, and political times.

Social Sculptures

Many of the works are permanent installations created to form spaces for community on the common land. The works function as tools for spending time together in the landscape, and visitors are invited to engage with them: light a fire, find rest, immerse themselves, or continue building upon the works — making the exhibition a place to stay for a while.

Cat’s Paws (2026) by Palestinian visual artist Samara Sallam is a large portal sculpture consisting of two mirrored structures. Built from reclaimed bricks and coated with mud harvested directly from the earth, it connects traditional earthen building practices from West Asia and Africa with local Danish clay and brick-building traditions on Møn. The work can serve as a gathering place, lookout tower, and pizza oven. Situated at the end of the path connecting the village and the common land, it marks the transition from everyday life into a space for reflection, connection, and collective participation.

Storytellings between mythologies, utopias and realities

The exhibition presents works originally created for other communities and locations, now brought together at Fanefjord Common in an exhibition full of sensory installations that create connections across cultures, narratives, knowledge systems, and political struggles.

The six-meter-high double-sided textile work Who Has Ever Been Able to Grasp the Depths of the Abyss? (2025) by Tunisian painter Yesmine Ben Khelil was originally created as a sail for the ship Svartlöga, moored in Grenaa Harbor. At Fanefjord Common, it is installed as a triangular flag structure whose captivating imagery tells a story where mythical sea creatures and sci-fi utopias swirl together with a reality marked by war ruins and ocean acidification.

The six-meter-long textile work Labarin Farfadowar Kasuwa (The Revival of the Market) (2025) was created by the Maiduguri-based women’s collective Tatsuniya Artist Collective (TAC). It tells the moving story of the devastating fire that swept through Maiduguri’s Monday Market in 2023, destroying thousands of shops and affecting the livelihoods of more than 20,000 traders. Across six panels, scenes depict everyday life in the market, the violence of the fire itself, intimate experiences of loss, and the collective rebuilding efforts that followed. Through embroidery and storytelling, the collective transforms this moment of rupture and destruction into a tapestry of shared memory, grief, and hope. The piece is presented together with a colorful series of woven mats by the collective that invite visitors to take rest – and possibly listen to a soundpiece by artist Harun Morisson that renegotiates an original sea shanty. Morrison's rewritten text shifts the perspective of the song away from maritime conquest and toward the voices of the hunted. The whales return as spectral witnesses to histories of extraction, violence, and ecological loss.

Pastoral Knowledges and Indigenous Worldviews

The exhibition also includes works that create space for forms of knowledge and ontologies that are often rendered invisible or are disappearing.

Sámi artivist Jenni Laiti invites visitors into a ritual space filled with portals hanging from the ceiling of a barn. Do Things in Circles is both a physical and symbolic threshold—a portal to an alternative future. In line with Sámi worldviews, Laiti proposes circular actions as world-making forces: processes of repetition, practice, return, and collective learning. The work reflects the cycles of seasons, generations, stories, and struggles that connect Indigenous peoples across geographies and places. In the background of Laitis installation is a series of colorful and captivating pictures by indigenous artist, native to North Siberia, Tulluk, that depict indigenous nature bound cosmology.

The Library of the Illiterate (2026) by Indian visual artist Dharmendra Prasad consists of a library of textless books installed among hay and tools. The work emerges from a critique of dominant forms of education and learning that separate knowledge from everyday life. From the position of the “uneducated,” the library asks: what would knowledge look like if it were not organized through written language, institutional authority, or the accumulation of power? The books are made from agricultural leftovers, fabric, mud, discarded grain, household objects, tools, and other everyday materials. They invite reading through touch, memory, labor, imagination, material histories, and relationships with the land.

Dharmendra Prasad will be in residence throughout the summer and invites residents of Hårbølle and exhibition visitors to expand the library with him. Over time, the work will grow through a collective gathering of discarded tools, materials, stories, and memories connected to rural life, craft traditions, ancestral knowledge, and farming practices from homes and farms on Møn. This collective archive becomes the building blocks of an installation that functions as a library, meeting place, and shared experiment in knowledge-making.

Interested in meeting Dharmendra and contributing to the Library of the Illiterate? Contact us at: ida.bencke@gmail.com, note: The Library of the Illiterate

Commoning as an Artistic and Curatorial Practice

This exhibition is the latest chapter in the exhibition project Hosting Lands—a four-year curatorial movement that has travelled across places, landscapes, and communities in Denmark with the aim of creating connections to other realities, localities, and positions in the world. Hosting Lands emerges from an exploration of what an exhibition can be and what it can do—not merely as a space of representation, but as an infrastructure for action, care, and collective organization. The project has explored how the exhibition format and its associated resources can be used to create space for new actions, alliances, and worlds.

One of the exhibition’s initiatives is the establishment of Fanefjord Common, the site where The Fire We Gather Around takes place. The land was acquired through exhibition funding and transferred into collective ownership. Over the past two years, artists, curators, and local residents have participated in what has been called the Fanefjord Common Committee—a shared forum where questions of land, ownership, community, and hospitality have been negotiated and renegotiated.

Fanefjord Common is both a physical place and an experiment: an attempt to explore the social, ecological, and aesthetic possibilities that emerge when land is understood as a shared concern rather than private property. Here, the land has been allowed to regenerate, new habitats have emerged, a forest garden is being developed according to permaculture principles, and artworks have been established to create spaces for community.

Artists in the Exhibition

DAAR, Marianne Noer, Dharmendra Prasad / The Harvest School, Jenni Laiti, Tulluk, Sata Taas, PDAS, Cassie Thornton, Yesmine Ben Khelil, Luis Berríos-Negrón, Jorge González Santos, Maria Nørholm Ramouk, Annette Holdensen, Samara Sallam, Kibandu Pello-Esso, Crying by the Sea, David Birk Lauridsen, Rahima Gambo & Tatsuniya Artist Collective, Harun Morrison

What to Expect / Practical Information

• Free admission
• Open until September 6
• Accessible at all times
• Only one exhibition space is locked and opens at selected times (TBA)
• The exhibition is unstaffed
• Information leaflets in Danish and English are available, including a map and introductions to the exhibition and artworks
• The landscape is gently hilly
• Compost toilets are available on site (with stairs)
• No water or electricity on site
• Address: Fanefjord Common, Hårbøllevej 52A, 4792 Askeby