In a story on Instagram, artist Mira Winding can be seen wandering around the Arken Museum of Modern Art in Ishøj. She holds a large dog on a leash in one hand and a spray can in the other, spray-painting the walls of the exhibition spaces in a liberatingly anarchic manner. There are also pictures of skate ramps awash in red light, a creepy S-train tunnel covered in graffiti, and Poul Cadovius’s iconic, white, shell-shaped bus shelter, now entirely overgrown with moss. In one of the photos, Esben Weile Kjær is in Arken’s archive, wearing a pair of white museum gloves and holding up a photograph by Sophie Calle, Mother (1990), so that it covers his face.
Weile Kjær is the first artist ever invited to curate an exhibition based on works from the Arken collection. The result is a total installation with the title BUTTERFLY! That’s where the pictures on the Insta story come from. It looks radical and fierce. Perhaps this transformation of the exhibition rooms also signals a change of direction for Arken, which opened in 1996 and has had Christian Gether in the director’s chair almost from the outset until 2022.
Weile Kjær’s sculpture of a far-from-cute butterfly has become the show’s mascot, and we might also read it as an ambiguous symbol of the institutional metamorphosis launched by Arken’s recently appointed director Marie Nipper, with BUTTERFLY! and the solo show featuring Turkish artist Refik Anadol as the first shoutouts of her tenure. Thursday’s party celebrated the opening of both exhibitions and included a performance by Weile Kjær, DJs and a concert with Lille Fucker. The free bus service offered from Copenhagen was overbooked well in advance, a sign of massive interest.
Weile Kjær’s career launched well before he graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2022, and his CV includes several solo shows at major institutions, including Power Play at Gl. Strand in 2020 and Hardcore Freedom at Copenhagen Contemporary that same year. For the latter, he created an anarchic performance party in which pop star Lina Rafn acted as a live embodiment of his neon Tinkerbell mascot. During the autumn of 2022, he staged his performance BURN at Centre Pompidou in Paris, and next year will see him present a solo show at Kunsten – Museum of Modern Art, Aalborg.
Given his background as a DJ, it is hardly surprising that Weile Kjær has always been great at getting a party going, and with his cross-media approach to art, he moves freely between genres. Even so, this is the first time he has curated a show based on a collection.
For BUTTERFLY! he has selected fifty works by artists such as Christian Boltanski, Claus Carstensen and Superflex, Elmgreen & Dragset, Malene Dumas, Erik A. Frandsen, Mads Gamdrup, Micha Klein, Jouko Lehtola, Sarah Lucas, Tal R, Torbjørn Rødland, and Wolfgang Tillmans. The main emphasis is on artists who greatly influenced the art scene in the 1990s.
How did you approach the task of curating an exhibition based on a collection like Arken’s?
I was interested in the collection even before being asked, so I began by picking out works I could remember seeing and then things took off from there. At a very early stage, I decided to commission two new, fairly extensive works by a couple of artists my own age: one being Mira Winding, the other Najaaraq Vestbirk aka Courtesy. I have worked closely with both of them for several years. In many ways, their two works set the stage for the rest of the exhibition. Together with Mira, I have developed the text for her work Something Forever, Forever Something, which she and her team have painted on all the walls. It constitutes a leitmotif throughout the exhibition, a graffiti intervention in the rooms. In that sense, it creates the backdrop for the entire show.
And then Najaaraq Vestbirk, working under the name Courtesy, who is a DJ and composer, composed the soundscape. It comprises two compositions, one for each room, which collide. This is to say that I have brought on board two all-encompassing voices in the exhibition, which join my scenography and conceptual approach in creating a context for all these works.
The press release states that your encounter with Arken’s works as a 15-year-old resonated with you because they resembled the world you grew up in. How did you choose the works for BUTTERFLY!?
I went about it very intuitively. That is how I generally approach works of art. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I am an artist and not an art historian: I first look at the work’s own inherent logic, which, of course, also has to do with the time in which it was created. I place it within an art-historical context, but that doesn’t happen automatically. It was quite exciting to see the differences between our approaches in my collaboration with Arken’s curator Jenny Lund, who sees a work as a representation of a practice.
For me, curating is emotional. It is about memory – memories and aesthetic experience. In my entire way of working as an artist, I am very referential, pointing to other artists, to mediation, advertising, and youth culture. I don’t believe in originality or authenticity, so I don’t entertain any notions about wanting to be original. That has never been a driving force for me. I rarely feel like I’m creating new images. Rather, I’m remixing images that already exist in the world.
It is well known that Arken’s collection is dominated by men, so it quite
quickly became clear to me that I could not make an equal gender balance. Nor do I want to force an image that is not representative of the collection, even though the museum has started to think differently in recent years. However, I think it’s important to look at the collection as it actually is and to deal with what is really there. The all-dominant graffiti intervention by Mira Winding as well as Najaaraq Vestbirk’s all-encompassing soundscape should also be seen in this light.
The actual selection progress began a long time ago with me browsing the catalogues and ticking the works I wanted to see in real life. Then we went to the archives. The process was all about how I could create a narrative that makes sense, makes for an exciting statement. It wasn’t something I tried to impose on the project right from the outset. It happened intuitively and quite by coincidence. It ended up primarily featuring works from the 1990s.
What’s with the whole 90s thing? Is there some particular energy there that resonates with our time right now?
For me, it’s not about creating a 90s exhibition. I was born in 1992, but I have no particular relationship with that time as a theme. I think a lot of 90s art resonates with our present right now because there was a kind of optimism there, a faith in the future, technology, and art. Things have happened very fast since then, and the 90s feel simultaneously far away and very close to us. The world has changed, and that is precisely why I am curious about how we look at these works now. For me, all the works feel very relevant.
Your staging of the collection comes across as quite radical and all-encompassing. Artist-curated shows are often criticised for letting the curatorial approach direct our focus away from the individual works. What are your thoughts on that?
I’m not too concerned with where works start and end. I have tried to show the works in my own way based on how I see them. But I have given a lot of thought to avoiding having the works feel like props. I want to place the works in a new context, forming new connections. For example, the museum has removed all their Damien Hirst pieces from display. I thought it would be fun to include him here, so now we’re showing his work in a new way against a backdrop of neon-coloured pigment, which is almost louder than Hirst himself. I think that creates an exciting dynamic. And it lets us play with humour and hierarchies through the juxtapositions.
There’s so much you could criticise, and maybe some will think that what I’ve done is too over-the-top, too controlling, too all-encompassing. But, hey, I’m an artist, and why would I work with the collection based on a notion of creating an objective space? I don’t believe in objective angles in anything.
When an institution invites an artist to curate an exhibition, they pass on some of the responsibility. What are your thoughts on that?
At the end of the day, it’s collaboration. But any and all shows that you make as a museum are your responsibility as an institution. I think that Arken’s collection is very obviously their responsibility, and I think it is a mark of responsible conduct to open up that collection and present the works in different ways, ensuring that they continue to live and are part of the times we live in. Some of the works I have put on display have not been shown in a long time, or even since they were acquired. To my mind, this is a relevant and experimental approach to writing art history, which, by the way, is a trend also seen at large institutions in many places around the world.
Have you included your own works in the exhibition?
I think that the approach I have taken, everything that envelops this exhibition, is like a work of art. I often create logos or mascots for my exhibitions; it’s part of my practice, just like Tinkerbell was the mascot for Hardcore Freedom. And for BUTTERFLY! I have made a large dystopian and Pop-like butterfly in painted bronze, which stands at the entrance to the exhibition on a patinated concrete plinth. This was a choice I made quite quickly, and having the sculpture placed inside the exhibition itself was never an option for me. Inside the exhibition rooms, I work with art created by other artists. But, then again, the concept of art I use in my various activities is not really governed by ideas like “work versus non-work.” I have created an exhibition, and it must speak for itself.
The butterfly and parts of the BUTTERFLY! universe were also part of a big fashion show for the Danish fashion brand Ganni, which took place last week at Arken in connection with Copenhagen Fashion Week. How does this tie in with the overall idea?
As an artist, I don’t see myself as an outsider. I don’t take a position where I can sit on the outside looking in at society and criticising it. I see myself as part of society and think that the outsider position can come across as a bit elitist because, of course, the art museum is part of the world, however dirty or not-dirty it may be. The museum is also a public space – fortunately. It cannot be isolated from the outside world. So, of course, the National Gallery of Denmark, Arken, and many other institutions are used for fashion shows, award shows, and other events. But, then again, since I’ve begun exhibiting my work in the US, it’s become clear to me how commercial the art scene is over there, so things are not clear-cut. In Denmark, things are still pretty light by comparison.
In general, the images I create are part of the world, and I am concerned with how they are distributed. My works not only talk about pop culture, but often become pop culture in their own right. As such, they also exist in newspapers, TV series, music videos, fashion shows, and so on. That is also a part of the way I exhibit my art.
Has your background as a DJ and your training as a music manager from The Rhythmic Music Conservatory given you a more fluid approach to working across media?
Well, yes. I wasn’t originally schooled in art, but came from the music industry. Before I attended the art academy, I worked as a DJ at fashion shows in Paris, which involved a lot of waiting, and while there I began to fantasise about what would happen if it all fell apart – if the entire room escalated. This was probably where I got the images that would later become the inspiration for my performances. A form of deconstruction of the image of a fashion show, now mutating and becoming something else.
That reminds me of the deconstruction of the theatre undertaken by the director Frank Castorf at the Volksbühne in Berlin in the 1990s, where he picked apart the classics and sprinkled them with samples of music, literature, and cultural or political references. Do you recognise that approach?
I think it’s cool to see the way many artists today are beginning to incorporate art-historical works in their practice. But, of course, we all stand on the shoulders of what others have done before us. I also think that this is part of how we will relate to art in the future. The idea of the unique genius will finally be dissolved. In any case, it’s a position I find difficult to take seriously or see myself in. Also, Denmark is the only place where I come across the attitude that an artist must be linked to one specific medium. We have long since dissolved the concept of the work of art, at least among the contemporary artists I know.
Can you tell us a little more about your world and the butterfly mascot? Is there a fascination with the infantile in your homages to images from popular culture dating from your childhood and youth?
If you are interested in popular culture, you are automatically also interested in the infantile. It’s partly about ensuring that many people can relate to it. There is a reason why petrol stations, for example, often have a teddy bear as a symbol: because oil and petrol are very complex quantities, but everyone can relate to a teddy bear. That’s pop. And in that way, the infantile is an approach that is used in a capitalist sense in general – to sell products – and that’s also why the world of fashion is so preoccupied with youth. Because it’s something we can all relate to, either because we’re young or because we yearn to be. So yes, I work with the infantile, but my works are never just passive. The butterfly, for example, is a remix of many modes of expression: it has the talons of an eagle, it has emo colouring, Kiss make-up, butterfly wings, and fangs. It’s not really sweet and not really disgusting either. It is uncanny.
Whenever I work with these objects, they have some kind of desperation or resistance in them, and that’s where they become interesting: they have bite; they can strike back and are no longer passive. If you were going to brand something as infantile, you would make sure you couldn’t hurt yourself on it; it wouldn’t be passively waiting to be exploited. All my objects have some form of agency. And this butterfly is somehow in the process of finding itself. It has replaced the pastel colours with something darker and stranger. It is mutating, becoming something else.
I have actually never really been interested in childhood as a theme, but I am interested in freedom as a phenomenon, in popular culture, in the experience economy, and in our society’s relentless pursuit of pleasure. So the butterfly is an example of how you can work with the childish without things becoming nostalgic or infantile. It does not become a toxic nostalgia, a concept taken from sociology which describes how conservative forms of nostalgia can keep you locked in the past.
The exhibition we have made is also quite brutal in certain ways. In the first room, I have placed Jes Brinch and Henrik Plenge Jakobsen’s giant syringe from 1996 on the floor. It’s seven metres long, pumping away in neon. And then there is Emil Westman Hertz’s Coffin (2008), propped up against a graffiti-painted wall. It’s a coffin that was made eight years before his death.
Very few will see this show as happy-go-lucky, but there is a duality here because I also grew up believing that we could conquer the world and make it our own. That’s also what graffiti represents, and what is so beautiful about it: you don’t have to resign yourself to simply being at the bottom of the hierarchy, having to accept things as they are. You can shape the world you live in.
