Who is this silver kid struggling to maintain his balance while hitching a ride on a tiny UFO? The lifelike but ethereal figure of a slim, tall young man, titled GRAVITY! (2024) after the force throwing him off, is all high-gloss polished steel on a dramatic concrete plinth. His is the only human figure in Esben Weile Kjaer’s Solar System, rendered in between landing on, slipping or jumping off the spaceship. Even if sporting little resemblance with the artist himself, he still appears as an alter ego, a more contemporary version of the notoriously ponderous comic book character Silver Surfer who swapped his cosmic surfboard for an insecure ride. A youthful Elon Musk escaping to Mars, maybe?
More likely he may be an older brother of the introvert boys populating the works of Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset. In their most recent intervention at the Musée d’Orsay, which opened only a month ago, there is a marble figure of a boy on a diving board overlooking the permanent collection as if wondering whether to jump.
Weile Kjær’s young man is struggling for his balance, and it would be supernatural if the artist wasn’t struggling at least a little to maintain his own after his recent ride to fame. Within a few years he has nearly become a household name in Denmark and has been heralded as the voice of a new generation. It’s every art student’s wet dream: a meteoric rise from the academy to international stardom in two years. Now he’s reporting back from cosmos, which surprisingly consists of rat infested ruins, crystallised bling detritus, and composite cartoon characters. It’s post-studio stuff displaying high-production values buffed to perfectionist sheen.
Although he is best known for performance works with inflatable props and carefully choreographed actors in costumes, Weile Kjaer shows no performance in Aalborg. This leaves the role of the protagonist to the shaky young man – and to viewers, who are free to explore the scenery on their own.
Solar System bathes in a soundscape by musician Moritz Haas (aka Europa), which oscillates between outright hymnic passages and mere ambient sounds perforated occasionally by interjections of intimate giggles or distant hollering – reminding this viewer of the legendary ambient tracks that Düsseldorf photographer Charles Wilp recorded in the 1960s as a backdrop for his photo studio.
Visually, the scenery is dominated by a cartoonish neon sun with the malicious grin (SUN!, all works, 2024) of a party pill, filling up the full expanse of the ceiling while halving the room’s height and hovering menacingly close above viewers. It suffuses the room with artificial yellow light, obliterating the effect of Alvar Aalto’s elaborate ceiling design for optimal natural lighting. It’s a theatre now, hinting at global warming, maybe, while giving the large slabs of white marble on the floor a piss-yellow tint.
A small population of rhinestoned RATS! bask in the glow inside a scenery of rotting concrete titled Hollow Structures 1-7,fictionalised versions of existing buildings: Soviet-era monuments and playground structures the artist visited while on a trip to Kaliningrad for a DJ gig; dilapidated bunkers, off-kilter as if partially sunken into the ground, based on the remnants of the Atlantic Wall (the coastal defense fortification built by the Nazis during the Second World War) still dotting the west coast of Jutland today. But while the artist experienced these buildings, here they represent not only ruins of bygone times, but also current playgrounds of youth. As derelict sites, these may be culturally and socially abandoned places, but this opens them up as relatively safe spaces for the exploration and formation of teenage identities. It’s not that far from other bunkers transformed to techno clubs or exhibition sites.
The first bunker in the show presents a silkscreen print by Andy Warhol, on loan from Louisiana Museum, from the series Shadows (1979). The series was one of the first in which Warhol experimented with abstraction as well as what he called “diamond dust,” actually ground glass. It creates visually fascinating surfaces that are difficult to handle: delicate, yet abrasive. Asked if it was art, Warhol replied it was “disco décor.”
This connects with Weile Kjær’s first career. Organising parties in his teens led him to an education in music management and to DJ gigs for parties and fashion events around the globe. Forays into performance and dance and an interest in interventions led him to art school. Together with his sister, curator and art historian Anna Weile Kjær, he transformed Copenhagen’s 2018 edition of the notoriously scruffy “alternative art fair” into an ambitious performance “mini-biennial” with “a queered blast of fresh air,” as Maria Bordorff called it in her review for Kunstkritikk. His curation of the Arken Museum of Contemporary Art’s permanent collection last year, titled BUTTERFLY, marked a breakthrough. It saw the artist selecting and resuscitating key works of the 1990s by setting them against a backdrop of a seemingly derelict but carefully crafted skatepark, complete with precisely scripted graffitied walls developed in dialogue with artist Mira Winding.
The transformation of the white cube into theatrical scenery marks a shift towards the “total installation” approach that is now on view in Aalborg. This concept leans on the ideas of late Moscow conceptualist Ilya Kabakov, who, when coining the term, was aiming to steer clear of the heroic notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) as envisioned by composer Richard Wagner. Unlike Wagner’s grand national-mythological operas, Kabakov’s total installations were made of cheap, flimsy materials that created scenery falling apart at its seams. Works such as The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment (1985) conveyed a sense of doubt in prevalent systems of power, the real life experience, and the narratives of the autocratic Soviet regime, if not language itself. Viewers could feel free in front of a painting or a sculpture, Kabakov noted. But in a total installation they would be directed by its intense atmosphere, becoming its victims as well as its creators by contributing their own memories and associations. The total installation literally condenses time.
Weile Kjær’s works figuratively condense time. His diamond-shaped epoxy casts were inspired by an article that claimed dying stars over a trillion years (our solar system is believed to exist for 4.6 billion years) would be compressed into diamonds, as if the whole universe rested on the notorious De Beers slogan “diamonds are forever.” Dull and dreadfully heavy, these works (MEMORY 1-3) enclose a plethora of blingy bric-a-brac, cheap jewelry, bottle openers, key rings, plastic lighters, and other advertising objects with corny company logos, interspersed with toys and various kitsch objects. Condensing time along these lines results in “crystallised” lumps of sentimental junk, following the logic of eternal accumulation to its ultimate extreme.
In this sense, Solar System is not really a total installation at all. But that doesn’t really matter. What it is is an entertaining and psychologically charged theatrical spectacle depicting a glamourised mess of emotional attachments and inescapable branded images against a background of climate disaster and sci-fi fantasies of eternity and of abandoning this planet. For all its allusions to youthful hedonism and cartoonish imagery, it comes across as a little silly-cute – but not without a club-culture-style sardonic twist. As an artistic enterprise, this is as sincere a reflection on human scale and truth as a theatrical installation can be. Aren’t we all surfers about to slip? Just look at the news. This is the moment for us viewers to regain balance. Or else!
