COLLIDED, LESS Festival of Contemporary Collage, Skovgaard Museum, 2025

Fellini Filling, Skovgaard Museum, 2025, COLLIDED, LESS Festival of Contemporary Collage.

Video password: supercollage

Collage is akin to change. Emerging in our modern art vocabulary during the early twentieth century, collage art quickly forged its identity as an iconoclastic and provocative medium. It is perhaps its natural course then that collage would be finding new footing in our increasingly inquisitive and multiplicitous society. As our LESS manifesto poem notes, LESS festival is interested in collage not only as a visual art, but as a strategy, an adaptable tool, and a philosophy that can implement learning and critique. We started LESS in 2020 and are excited to now reemerge as a triennale and in partnership with the historic Skovgaard Museum, which has been at the heart of Viborg’s artistic community since it opened its doors in 1937.

In our exhibition COLLIDED we step behind the curtain with three masterful artists. We are invited to hide and seek in Katrien De Blauwer’s flickering scenography. We encounter Sergei’s collage conversation with Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ as he considers the poetic potential of intuitive narrative. And we enter the maze of Kensuke Koike’s curious magic, as he seeks the infinite possibilities of a singular image. Our LESS Garden looks to highlight emergent artists and methodologies in our international collage community. We find our selves in Tereza Zelenkova’s haunted historic interventions, and in Kate Street’s amorphous feminist critiques. We map topologies of place and mind, and thread old and new crafts through the work of Adam Brierley, Gert Motmans, and Alice Quaresma. In the years since our first festival, Sergei has worked with the Danish arts ambassador and museum director Christian Kortegaard Madsen to establish and build the LESS Academy at the Skovgaard Museum — an art school for young people enabling the creative tools to connect art with their urban environment, and to build a community of learning.

In a radically changing and often divisive society LESS is motivated to amplify the methodologies and potentialities of collage as a simultaneously radical and social practice. As our festival grows we hope to expand upon questions of not only what contemporary collage is, but what can contemporary collage do? FAYE DOWLING Curator in Chief, LESS Festival of Contemporary Collage.

INSTAGRAM