Dreams — VSG at Juxtapose, Aarhus 2025
Virtual Studio Groups at Juxtapose, Godsbanen, Rå Hal, Aarhus, Denmark. June 13–15, 2025.
In June 2025, Virtual Studio Groups participated in Juxtapose — held at Godsbanen, a former train station and cultural centre in Aarhus, Denmark, and we showed alongside 22 other artist-run projects from across Europe and beyond.
About Juxtapose
Juxtapose was founded in 2018 by co-directors Cecilie Bernts and Pamela Grombacher with the specific intention of creating a space for artist-run projects that were being excluded from commercial fairs. As Pamela explained to VSG members during a live Zoom walkthrough of the fair, the name itself says it all: to juxtapose is to place different things side by side so you can better understand and appreciate the differences between them.
"We don't have a theme. Instead, we just try to show as many different kinds of artist-run projects as we can." — Pamela Grombacher, Co-Director, Juxtapose
Juxtapose takes place in the Rå Hal — the Raw Hall — of Godsbanen, a vast former goods-unloading room in the old train station. Rather than standard white-wall booths, exhibitors are given a set of precision-cut wooden modules — interlocking boards that can be assembled like a puzzle without power tools, year after year, to build whatever structure fits the project. Some exhibitors use them; some don't. That freedom is part of the concept.
This year Juxtapose also officially dropped the word "art fair" from its identity — a deliberate move, both to shed commercial associations and to open up what the event can be. There are now year-round public and professional programmes developing alongside the annual event, all aimed at supporting artist-run initiatives.
The range of projects on show was extraordinary: an artist-run school on a farm in Colchester; a space that began in Damascus and has been based in Stockholm for ten years; an outdoor ceramic studio; a photography newspaper from Norway; a queer itinerant space from Uppsala; a performance collective doing a live news studio; architects who used no modules and responded directly to the building's architecture instead. And VSG — an online community of artists, presenting a physical wall of dreams.
Watch the Tour
During the fair, Pamela Grombacher gave VSG members a live Zoom walkthrough of the entire exhibition — booth by booth, project by project. The recording is embedded above.
Our Exhibition: Dreams
What image could represent a dream? A flicker of light, a blurred memory, a symbolic object, or a sudden feeling without name?
Dreams invited VSG artists to respond to this question through a single image, printed in Instax Square format and displayed collectively on one wall. Each photograph stands alone — a glimpse into one artist's interior landscape — yet together they form a shared constellation of poetic fragments.
We asked each participant to send one digital image. It could be a photo of an artwork, a photograph taken spontaneously, a still life or object, something symbolic, abstract, or deeply personal. The limitation of the format — one image, one small square — became part of the creative process. This is both a collective work and an archive of individual visions. A wall of dreams.
How can dream narratives become photographs? This question hovered behind every image: not to be answered, but followed. In a dream, logic loosens and things transform. These images, too, resist strict interpretation — some reveal, some conceal, all invite the viewer into a layered space between memory, fiction, and emotion.
Participating Artists
Twenty-one VSG members contributed an image to the collective wall:
Gordana Zikic · Bosko Begovic · Theresa Wilshusen · Ilija Dincic · Raymond Watson · Cassandra Stubbington · Ylva Eklöf · Paula Elion · Predrag Damjanovic · Elena Greta Falcini · Kai Rennes · Juan David Gallindo · Juan Antonio Cerezuela · Juan Pablo Meneses · Katarina Rasic · Zey Öztaşdelen · Genevieve Leavold · Åsa Ekman · Seb Bradshaw · River Reishi · Rosie Hearne
A Visual Dialogue: Theresa Wilshusen & Gordana Zikic
Among the VSG participants, two artists — Theresa Wilshusen and Gordana Zikic — brought more than a single Instax print to the exhibition. Each had developed a more extended body of work around the Dreams theme, and their individual approaches, while distinct, entered into an unexpected dialogue at the fair.
Both work with collage as a method — layering digital iPad drawing over photographic images to build a visual language that sits between documentation and invention. The result in each case is imagery that feels simultaneously grounded and displaced: the logic of dreams made visible through a specific, recognisable hand.
Theresa Wilshusen's series layers white line drawings over landscape photographs — hands, stones, water, geological forms — building images that feel like memories of places half-remembered. Each work holds a physical specificity (a particular rock, a particular coastline) that dissolves under the drawn lines into something more interior. The series has its own coherence as a body of work: a sustained visual investigation of how the material world appears when seen from inside a dream.
Gordana Zikic's work operates in a similar register but with a different charge: figures, feet, shoes placed into open water, the body navigating a landscape that feels uncertain beneath it. Where Wilshusen's imagery tends toward the elemental and geological, Zikic's carries a sense of movement and contingency — standing somewhere you might not stay. Together their works formed a quiet conversation within the larger collective wall: two different visual languages finding a shared grammar in the collage of drawing over photography — each one distinct, each one recognisably part of the same question.
