When I arrived at the Copenhagen Backpackers Hostel, one of the first things that caught my eye was a leaflet for an exhibition called Djiboutis Farver or The Colours of Djibouti in English. The picture on the front was of a wall with a small window cut into it, the bottom half a dirty salmon and the top a washed out baby blue.
The name of the venue, and the leaflet, had slipped out of my mind until my friend Signe said over lunch, “I really want to visit the Islamic art museum.”
I asked her where it was and what it was called, looking for a chance to build on my exploration of Essaouira’s Museum in the summer. She made a noise that sounded a bit like, “dad’s salmon.” Then she spelled it out and it was the same place that I had been looking at the leaflet for.
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After chasing the changing of the guard around town for a bit and having a coffee in the Grønlands Repræsentation, I wandered towards the innocuous entrance to the Davids Samling Collection, opposite the Kongens Have or King’s Garden.
Downstairs there is a collection of European artwork, but I bypassed this to see the Peter Bonnén exhibition first.
The photography centres on what is essentially something very ordinary; the painted walls and doors of houses and commercial buildings in Djibouti, a small country in northeast Africa with colonial ties to France and cultural ties to its neighbours, Somalia and Ethiopia.
What makes his works interesting is encapsulated in the photographer's introduction to the gallery. Bonnén states that when he used to attempt to paint in his younger years, he found his works becoming more and more monochrome. Even today he says, “I am not that good at colours.”
When Bonnén visited Djibouti, with its mass of foreign soldiers to combat piracy and the chaos of the market when a delivery of khat from Ethiopia arrives, he “found the colours and the colour combinations that [he] had always sought.”
Indeed, what his photographs are representative of are something quite idiosyncratic and document how “the colours of the houses and doors everywhere [he] looked were so surrealistic that they sang.” This was a perfect explanation for the collection, and especially for my personal favourite Djibouti 12.
Having taken the time to absorb the colours of every single image I saw, I walked upstairs to where the another, permanent treasure trove lay in wait.
The Djiboutis Farver exhibition is at the Davids Samling Collection until 16th April 2017. More information can be found at https://www.davidmus.dk/en/.
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