The opening of the Oresundsbron bridge between Copenhagen and Malmo last month represents something more than a functional link between two cities separated by The Sound, the Oresund. The huge 7.8km bridge, together with a 4km tunnel and a 4km stretch of artificial island, incorporates a two-line railway and a four-lane motorway. As Denmark's capital, Copenhagen could be seen as the senior partner in the deal, while Malmo is the main urban centre in Sweden's relatively neglected, predominantly rural southern region. The bridge-builders, then, are doing nothing less than defining a new, transnational region, which they have appropriately called the Oresund, after the body of water that previously separated them.
For the inhabitants, the political, economic, social and cultural implications are potentially enormous. Already, two completely new townships, Orestad on the Danish and Brostad on the Swedish side, are being developed. Eleven universities in the region are pursuing a co-ordinated strategy, and biotechnological, medical and pharmaceutical industries are being targeted to avail of a highly sophisticated workforce.
Tourists are being enticed by the contrasting attractions of cosmopolitan Copenhagen and the beautiful countryside beyond Malmo. As Stefan Skold, conductor and director of the Malmo Music Theatre, put it, the bridge means that you can live in Malmo and work in Copenhagen, and vice versa. As a Swede who inclines towards the Danish lifestyle, he may be tempted himself. Doubtless, civil servants are even now figuring out the taxation and benefit issues that this raises, but the two countries are politically and economically very similar. There isn't even a language barrier. As Stefanie Czechowsky, a German journalist specialising in Scandinavian affairs notes, the languages are so close that Swedes and Danes can actually converse with ease, it's just that, with a long and difficult history between them, they have tended not to.
The vision and ambition of the planning that have gone into Oresund are genuinely impressive, particularly from the vantage point of Ireland, where any account of bridge-building between two communities with long-standing cultural differences must be regarded as instructive.
To underline the breadth of the agenda, the partners in the Oresundsbron have organised a huge cultural festival, Kulturbro, or Culture bridge, to mark the beginning of a new era. Intended as the first of a biennial series, Kulturbro 2000: At the Borders, began yesterday and runs to December 15th, and incorporates extensive programmes of international exhibitions, theatre, dance and music.
Planning for Kulturbro 2000 began in 1997, with museum director Lars Nittve at the helm. Then heading the stunning Louisiana Museum of Modern Art north of Copenhagen (and previously director of the Rooseum in Malmo), Nittve has in the meantime moved on to the one job in the world that he said could tempt him away from Louisiana: director of the new Tate Modern in London. The secretariat of the festival is currently headed by Bo Bjerggaard, a quietly capable former associate of Nittve's, whose Copenhagen Gallery handles the foremost contemporary Danish artist, Per Kirkeby.
Kulturbro capitalises on the fact that the new region, Oresund, comes with a formidable arts infrastructure in the form of an unrivalled range of museums, galleries, theatres and music halls. Louisiana, for example, beautifully situated overlooking The Sound, will explore three of the early 20th century's most significant avant-garde artistic movements, Russian Constructivism, Futurism and De Stijl, and their repercussions in later decades, in a major exhibition, titled Visions and Reality: Conceptions of the 20th Century, which will include works by pioneers such as Malevich, Rodchenko, Boccioni and Mondrian with more contemporary names like James Turrell, Bruce Nauman, Mona Hatoum and Zaha Hadid. An Annie Liebovitz retrospective is also running at Louisiana until November 26th.
In an imaginative pendant to this show, Malmo's Rooseum has A Century of Innocence: the story of the white monochrome, "a mythical icon in the history of modern art", with, of course, Malevich again, but also Rothko, Barnett Newman, Jasper Johns, Antonio Tapies, Yves Klein, Gerhard Richter, Joan Mitchell and many others. To the south of Copenhagen, Arken Museum for Modern Art, a striking, nautical-styled building beautifully situated amid the dunes of Ishoj Strand, is staging its own survey show, Man: Body in Art from 1950 to 2000, incorporating some of the most radical approaches to the theme of the human body in art, from Bill Viola's Nantes Triptych to Carolee Schneemann's ground-breaking self-exploratory Eye Body from 1963. Georg Baselitz, Tom Wesselmann, Jake and Dinos Chapman and others also feature.
ONE problematic aspect of the bridge is the impact it will have on the hectic ferry-traffic between the sister ports of Elsinor and Halsingborg at the north of The Sound. Curator Pontus Kyander decided to tackle this issue with an exhibition of 24 contemporary works distributed throughout the harbour areas. Participants include the Chinese artist Zhang Huan, who made quite an impact at last year's Venice Biennale, the Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist, who showed at EVA earlier this year, the Korean Cho Duck-Hyun, whose show has just finished at the Gallagher Gallery, Jimmie Durham, who has shown in the Douglas Hyde, and highly regarded installation artist Mariele Neudecker.
Filmmaker Peter Greenaway's installation Flying Over Water at the Malmo Art Gallery is a continuation of his exploration of the myth of Icarus. Also in Malmo, the Art Museum devotes a show to the maverick late-19th century Swedish artist Carl Fredrik Hill, whose later works, tinged with dark surrealism, argues director Goran Christenson, seem more comprehensible in retrospect. At Copenhagen's NY Carlsberg Glyptotek, Gloria Victis! ingeniously pairs the work of the Impressionists with that of the academicians they eventually ousted in terms of both popularity and historical importance. Shows at Ordrupgaard and Holte will be devoted to Delacroix and Egon Schiell respectively.
Two artists, Christian Lemmerx and Michael Kvium, have taken on the surely impossible task of filming Finnegans Wake. In, fact they tacitly admit as much. What they've done is to make an eight-hour silent movie, The Wake, that aims at an equivalent level of" complexity and radicalness". Their multimedia project also involves video installation and a "virtual dream" broadcast on the internet. The staid Danish Museum of Decorative Art in Copenhagen has invited the iconoclastic artist, director and designer Robert Wilson, best known for his associations with minimalist composer Philip Glass, to stage an exhibition based on its superb collections.
His imaginative response, Anna did not come home that night, recreates the last day in the life of a woman who disappears.
Kulturbro 2000: At the Borders, comprising more than 50 cultural projects, runs from yesterday to December 15th. Facts and information are available at the festival's website: www.kulturbro.com
