Marie Kølbæk Iversen: Tiden og Stunden
During the dark autumn and winter months, SMK Thy presents a new version of artist Marie Kølbæk Iversen’s video work Time and the Hour
During the dark autumn and winter months, SMK Thy presents a new version of artist Marie Kølbæk Iversen’s video work Time and the Hour.
The work shows the current state of the local waters with underwater footage from the North Sea and the Limfjord. From 17.15 - 21.30 , the piece is projected onto the large glass facades of the Warehouse (Pakhuset), making the museum building almost appear like a large freestanding aquarium at night.
The title, Time and the Hour, comes from a 18th-century folk tale about the systematic drainage and cultivation of heathland and meadows. According to the legend, a village community inadvertently hired the mythical creature Nøkken – called Hr. Nek in West Jutland – to drain their fields. However, instead of digging waterways as agreed, he merely dragged his spade behind him, and the villagers subsequently refused to pay him. Hr. Nek then replied that he would instead demand one human life per year as payment. From then on, the tale warns people to be careful approaching the stream if no one had drowned there that year. Suddenly, Hr. Nek might shout from the water: “The time and the hour have come, but the human has not yet come.” This would cause the person closest to throw themselves to their death in the water.
The video documents the coastal marine environment in various places around Thy, and Marie Kølbæk Iversen borrows Nøkken’s statement as a commentary on the current state of affairs.
"The time and the hour have indeed come for humanity to do something about its emissions of carbon and toxins, but humanity itself apparently has not yet come to this realization," says Marie Kølbæk Iversen.
The work can be experienced for free from 17.15 - 21.30 in the courtyard in front of the Warehouse.
Idea, concept, and editing: Marie Kølbæk Iversen
Cinematography: Martin Busborg, 2025
Previous versions of the work have been shown at Kunsthal Aarhus in connection with Marie Kølbæk Iversen’s solo exhibition New Atlantics (2025), with footage from Aarhus Bay and Kalø Vig, and at composer Katinka Fogh Vindelev’s interdisciplinary opera HOLO (Hologram) (2024) for Randers Chamber Orchestra, with footage from Randers Fjord.
Biography
Marie Kølbæk Iversen (b. 1981) lives and works in Copenhagen and Klitmøller. She graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2008 and holds a practice-based PhD from the Oslo Academy of Fine Art and Aarhus University. In April 2023, she received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Novo Nordisk Foundation with the research project Commons Futurism | Futurities of the Commons, which is based at SMK Thy and runs through 2026. Marie Kølbæk Iversen is represented in several public art collections and has exhibited widely in Denmark and internationally.