Mikkel Elming (primarily based in Aarhus) holds an MA in Art History with a Master’s thesis in “Curating and Curiosity” and a Special Profile in International Communication & Intercultural Competence, and a BA in Art History and Journalistic Communication with a Bachelor’s thesis about ”The End of Art”, all from Aarhus University (2014-2019). Elming is a curator at Kunsthal Aarhus, which is one of Denmark’s oldest (build in 1917) and most important contemporary art centres. In August 2020 he will be curating an exhibition inspired by and named after the book “The Ignorant Schoolmaster” (1987) by Jacques Rancière. Mikkel Elming is the first curator to be employed as such by Kunsthal Aarhus apart from the artistic director.
Elming is the director of Regelbau 411 which is an international art centre of sound, light and video art in two WWII bunkers located on the southern peak of the peninsula of Thyholm in the City of Sound, the municipality of Struer, Denmark. The bunkers opened in the summer of 2018 and is currently showing the eighth exhibition. Elming is the chairman of Foreningen for Samtidskunst (The Association of Contemporary Art), which is an association founded in 2016 with two fellow students. Today the association has +120 members in Aarhus, Copenhagen and Amsterdam. The association is an open platform for contemporary art projects, exhibitions and network – focusing especially on giving young artists and curators professional experience. Among the projects, the association has been curating a yearly exhibition of transitory art called Aarhus Artspace.
This summer Mikkel Elming has launched a new freelance project in collaboration with the Danish curator Konrad Nielsen working towards the opening of a new museum, beginning with a Phase 0 called Becoming an Institution or How We Learned to Stop Exhibiting and Love the Museum. The aim of Phase 0 is to conceptualize the museum to be through exhibitions and collaborations with artists.
Mikkel Elming mostly works with transitory and performative media and common themes in his curatorial practice are temporality, site-specificity, social engagement, education, communication, contemporary human condition, posthumanism, challenging conventional curation, and performativity.
“Most dominantly, I have a recent interest in pointing out and challenging conventions of temporality in institutional exhibitions. I want art to be present, alive and used by the experiencers. I want to work with and to challenge artists to make art for display formats that are shaped by this aliveness of the art experience.”