The Arabic saying LW TITLA3 B RASEK NAKHLA is the title of ihsan saad ihsan tahir’s largest solo exhibition to date. In dialogue with Four Boxes’ iconic architecture, the artist has created a site-specific total installation that brings viewers closer to the work of the hand and the artist’s personal life.

In 1995, the Tahir family arrived in the Danish provincial town of Skive after a long journey from Iraq. Their arrival defined the national framework that shaped tahir’s upbringing and later the environment in which he was educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.

As a newly graduated visual artist, tahir returns to Skive with archival materials and sketches from the family’s early years in the market town.

The title LW TITLA3 B RASEK NAKHLA is written in Arabizi—an informal writing system that emerged because early mobile phones did not support Arabic characters. In Danish, the poetic Arabic proverb can be translated as: “even if a palm tree were to grow out of your head.” The expression is often used by parents as a dismissal, similar to “impossible” or “only in your imagination.” It is a saying that tahir—like many other children of Arab parents—heard repeatedly throughout his upbringing.

The exhibition presents both new and existing works in granite, charcoal, and oil. LW TITLA3 B RASEK NAKHLA is part of the exhibition series unboxing, curated by Rebekka Laugesen and supported by the Ny Carlsberg Foundation and the Danish Arts Foundation.

ihsan saad ihsan tahir (b. 1995, UK/DK) graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (2025) and Goldsmiths, University of London (2025), and lives and works in Copenhagen. tahir has previously exhibited at O-Overgaden (2026); Kunsthal Kongegaarden, Korsør (2026); SKAL Contemporary, Skagen (2025); 13 Vitrine, Lausanne (2024); Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus (2023; 2024); Collega, Copenhagen (2024); and All All All, Copenhagen (2023).

Photos by David Stjernholm

Four Boxes Gallery presents the exhibition Within The Wall by artist Kaja Lahoda, with an opening on April 14, 2026. The exhibition is a new version and installation of the originally commissioned show for Tranen in Gentofte, curated by Toke Lykkeberg.

In Kaja Lahoda’s exhibition Within The Wall, the building’s masonry is turned inside out. Her works do not simply hang on the wall. What she presents within the building’s walls points to what lies inside them. Lahoda is not concerned with bricks, concrete, wood, and drywall. Instead, she investigates, cuts into, shapes, and works with the stone wool hidden behind them. From this lifeless material, figures emerge to the surface. In Within The Wall, insulation—normally unnoticed—moves to the foreground, and the inert material is animated by spirit and all manner of creeping life. The wall takes on a life of its own, moving in and out of itself.

All the technical installations, including rockwool, that serve humanity’s arrangement of its own small world at a comfortable distance from the larger world are hidden away in walls, ceilings, and floors. When the outside world breaks in, the discomfort is therefore all the greater. A mouse, fungus, or puddle that might be a minor curiosity outdoors is received on the other side of the wall with a shiver, as an inappropriate intrusion. Lahoda stages this discomfort through misplaced organisms and pests.

Lahoda is drawn to a sense of gothic horror in the realization that even we modern humans inhabit houses that host uninvited guests. The walls become breeding grounds for creatures—and not least for the imagination. The walls that were meant to separate inside life from outside life become porous in her work, signaling a shift in the supporting structure. What Lahoda digs into beyond the stone wool is also humanity’s new uncertainty at a time when our buildings and cities are threatened by more water, storms, and fire. For the so-called “indoor human,” who spends 90% of their time inside, it is our entire culture, society, and civilization that begins to waver when the interior is under threat.

The project is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation, Statens Værksteder for Kunst, Grosserer L. F. Foghts Fond, and Den Hielmstierne-Rosencroneske Stiftelse.

Text: Toke Lykkeberg

Four Boxes Gallery presents Loach Water by Zishi Han and Wei Yang. A loach is a small, clear-eyed, black-beaded fish common in China – slippery, playful, and solitary by nature. It is a bottom-dweller of muddy pond waters. Across their floors, the exhibition invites us into a quiet yet multilayered universe, where homoerotic tales from the Ming dynasty meet a European present, hovering somewhere between autobiography, fiction, myth, and reality. Drawing on the more than 400-year-old Chinese anthology Biàn ér chāi (Hairpin Beneath), which explores love, gender, and desire, Han and Yang reinterpret the novel Qingzhen ji (A Story of Faithful Love), in which an academician falls in love with a younger student.

The Ming dynasty anthology offers a rare and poetic glimpse into the era’s narratives of homoerotic relationships. First published under the pseudonym The Moon-Heart Master of the Drunken West Lake, it is said to have been banned during the Qing dynasty. Loach Water is a personal and artistic journey that moves between fiction and biography, history and the present. Han and Yang explore how power and desire are shaped by time and culture across shifting boundaries. At a moment when LGBTQ+ rights are being rolled back around the world, the artists connect historical narratives with their own lived experiences as queer artists and members of the Chinese diaspora in Europe.

Through video, performance, and sculpture, they examine the relationships between closeness and estrangement, presence and absence, power and intimacy. On their own terms, with clear eyes, they navigate the muddy currents of past and present.

Analog drawings and digital manipulation abound in a collection of works that span two different architectural and artistic practices.
Interference explores the productive tensions that arise when Rosa Prichard’s meticulous analogue craftsmanship converges with Rune Wriedt’s digital experiments. The resulting works reveal unexpected resonances between seemingly oppositional processes.

The exhibition disrupts conventional boundaries between analogue and digital worlds, inviting viewers to question how we perceive and represent space. Their collaborative dialogue encompasses graphite drawings transformed into dynamic 3D manipulations, as well as sustainable architectural visions expressed through both physical sketches and AI-generated fever dreams.

Four Boxes Gallery presents the exhibition Evighedsgryden by artist Ellinor Åslund.

In Ellinor Åslund’s first solo exhibition, we enter her immersive and grotesque universe, where marionettes and ceramic sculptures come to life to stage a theatre of existential absurdity.

Through songs, video, and baroque ceramics, a series of narratives unfold – including Die Ewige Suppe (2025), a surreal puppet theatre opera set in a bar where the main character, a ceramic doll modelled after the artist herself, shares fragmented and life-defining memories, including pregnancy and early motherhood.

The theatre unfolds as an eternal stew – a mutable concoction of memories, dreams, and political realities – while the bar transforms into a shifting stage where nurses, fairy-tale figures, war ghosts, nationalist street vendors, and bureaucratic enforcers cross paths, revealing the entanglements between personal and collective histories.

The work is presented alongside a 75-minute video, the richly ornamented stage, props, and puppets. A segment of the piece will also be performed live by the artist during the opening.

The exhibition also features Gonzan (2024), a series of large ceramic sculptures portraying two parrot chicks, a ceramic rendition of a Fabergé egg with a scene inside, a pair of richly decorated sunglasses, and large pieces of jewellery. In a two-channel video, we hear a 3D animation of the parrot Gonzan singing the story of his upbringing, gradually realizing his position in the world of humans.

Alongside these large-scale installations, Åslund presents a new work that continues her exploration of the medium of puppet theatre opera – this time focusing on the theatre itself.

Unclaimed Luggage is a site-specific exhibition that transforms Four Boxes into a “home in dissolution.” Through found objects, Winther examines the structures that define the space of the nuclear family – and the power dynamics that unfold between human and object, care and control, life and afterlife.

All materials are collected and processed on site, making the exhibition both an experiment and an insight into a working process in which context shapes the artwork. In a society characterized by welfare and abundance, where everything can be left behind and replaced, the discarded objects become evidence of systems of both value and consumption.

As part of the exhibition, Winther invites her collaborator Charlie Boyte – who together with Winther forms the design duo Crude – to create deconstructed sofas. Crude works exclusively with recycled materials and, through intuitive, almost surgical processes, explores how objects can be reborn in new forms.

Unclaimed Luggage continues Winther’s investigation into the structures that define value, ownership, and relationships within the modern Western home – and into the stories that lie hidden in what is left behind.

Memory Drip by Olivia Rode Hvass is an exhibition of woven landscapes, where magnificent tapestries create portals between past and present. Here, myth and history intertwine with questions of power, conquest, and our bond with nature. Using the loom as a tool, Rode Hvass weaves a story of care and cohesion in a fragmented world, asking if it’s possible to break free from apathy and loneliness in times of crisis, when caring communities are vital yet fragile in our individualistic society.

In Memory Drip, we get to know the horse and the digital loom, not merely as animal and technology, but as unlikely kin—mentors, mirrors, and companions. The horse as motif and figure forms the common thread in Rode Hvass’ works, flowing between worlds as a metaphor for the encounter between present and past, between the earthly and the supernatural.

The exhibition’s works draw connections to the historical tapestry series La Chasse à la licorne from the 16th century, which depicts mysterious medieval fantasies of unicorn hunts. The symbolic meaning of the unicorn is far-reaching. In the unicorn hunt, it has historically represented humanity’s desire to possess, categorize, and exploit. It symbolizes the magical, the foreign, the uncontrollable, the wild, and the free—and today is, for example, embraced as a queer symbol in internet cultures. Whereas La Chasse à la Licorne celebrates the hunt for the unicorn as a triumph, Rode Hvass questions the narratives of seizure and power as success and explores the violence embedded in stories of unicorn hunting. In the tapestries, the landscapes are deserted, the once-lush hunting grounds scattered with withered hay, and the mythical unicorn has been transformed into an earthy, hornless horse.

With Memory Drip, Rode Hvass brings myths and history into the present, asking whether it is possible to break through apathy and loneliness in times of crisis, when caring communities are necessary yet face difficult conditions in our individualized, production-driven society.

Memory Drip is curated by Rebekka Laugesen.

The exhibition Between Times by visual artist Sophie Hjerl displays Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and video works in dialogue with physical space and objects, which together create a kind of new total installation.

With this exhibition, Sophie Hjerl challenges the perception of the virtual versus the physical in themes that revolve around the existential extremes of life. The exhibition examines and dissects the material, which, together with virtual and physical space and objects, shifts the concept of reality. Because when is something truly real, and how are we affected by the immaterial and virtual?

Time and space have always been considered inseparable factors, but with virtual tools, humans can appear on the other side of the globe and now even wage wars over distances that were previously impossible. As in quantum physics, where electrons appear in multiple places at once, we are no longer present in just one place. We are now present in many places in “between times.”

The works are a mix of newer, brand-new, and older pieces that together create new narratives in the exhibition. The viewer moves between the extremes of death and birth and in a limbo between worlds. Hjerl finds it interesting to work with concepts that may seem “banal,” difficult, and prone to missteps. She is intrigued by what happens when these life events or circumstances are evoked in art.

With thanks for help and support to: Glas og Ramme Skive, Peter Meldgaard, Jesper Fleng, Rasmus Koch, Krabbesholm Højskole, and Kulturelt Samråd Skive.

Four Boxes Gallery presents Ecce Homo—an exhibition by Danish visual artist Tore Hallas. Hallas’ work engages with themes of fatness and queerness, giving space, sound, and image to bodies, conditions, and discourses often excluded from mainstream screens and stages.

Using the camera as his primary tool, Hallas explores how constructions of desire, ideals, and power take form. In his film You Are Closer To God When You Do Not Indulge, 2023 explicit intimate scenes are paired with references to scientific articles that shed light on bodies often deemed unworthy of sexualization and the economic consequences of this judgment. The exhibition also includes a new sculptural work in which the artist’s own body encounters representations of perhaps the most idealized torso in art history. And in a new large-scale site-specific installation, viewers are invited into a hotel room on a film set, enveloped by a soundscape of heavy, rhythmic breathing.

The exhibition is generously supported by Ny Carlsbergfondet, the Danish Arts Foundation, and Skive Municipality. Ecce Homo is part of the exhibition series Unboxing curated by Rebekka Laugesen.

Four Boxes, Krabbesholm Højskole’s gallery welcomes the exhibition ‘The Poor Connection’ and the publication of the book ‘Poor and Needy’, both created by Yvette Brackman and Lise Haller Baggesen.

Participating artists: Edra Soto, Sofia Leiby, Anni Holm, Matt Morris, Kurt Finsten, Ulla Hvejsel, Anja Franke, Jim Duignan, Josh Mittelman, Jenny Kendler, Christa Donner, Andrew Yang, Michelle Eistrup, Kirsten Leenaars, Henrik Plenge Jakobsen, Rashalya Marie Brown, Hannah Heilmann, Nanna Lysholt Hansen, Skovsnogen, Mobil Kultur Buro

The book ‘Poor and Needy’ is published by The Poor Farm and Krabbesholm.

Lise Haller Baggesen and Yvette Brackman introduce the exhibition:

Poor & Needy started as an invitation from the artists, educators and curators Brad Killam and Michelle Grabner, about two years ago, to “do something ” for the 2016 Great Poor Farm Experiment VIII, an art center and event in Manawa in rural Wisconsin. The exhibition and symposium that was Poor and Needy at The Poor Farm now arrives in Denmark as The Poor Connection at Krabbesholm Højskole, an important institution for aspiring artists, writers, and thinkers, situated in the heart of Jutland. The Poor Connection brings together artists from Scandinavia and the American Midwest, to strengthen and explore the connections between these two demographics and better understand their shared history and how they relate to the subjects of cooperation, migration, labor and debt.

The artist’s colony, because that is what both The Poor Farm and Krabbesholm are, is located somewhere between Utopia and a gated community; questions of exclusivity and inclusivity repeatedly come into play here. But at least, these are open-ended conversations, not the law. In addition to the exhibition we have produced an exhibition catalogue with texts and works from artists and writers that reflect upon the open-mindedness of our local and global communities.

Come one come all, it doesn’t say RSVP on the statue of Liberty; it does not say so on the gates of the art world either!