Yes, Esben Weile Kjær is 6’5” with blue eyes, but he’s a man in fine art rather than finance—and the world is better off for it. The ascent of this 32-year-old Dane has been breathtaking, but the artist, a man at ease with himself, is taking it all in stride.
His latest adventure takes place in a parking lot in East Williamsburg, where, at the invitation of Amant, he constructed Shell, a concrete-covered wooden edifice that Frankensteins together, he explained on the phone, “a castle and a factory and a war bunker and a brutalist playground [and] a Soviet bus stop.” The hollowness of the building is intentional; part of its function was as a proscenium for a one-night only performance. On the far side of Shell, to a soundtrack by fellow Dane Loke Rahbek (known as Croatian Amor), Kjær recently gathered 1,000 white roses and four local performers, who joined him in running out from the castle to strew flowers on the ground and attach some of them to their bodies with packing tape. The choreography had a dance-like-nobody’s-watching vibe, which saw the group writhing, bending like Gumby, air boxing, and “eating” flowers, while sparkle machines intermittently shot columns of light into the appropriately dramatic cloudy sky. “I love that they put glitter into the air around the trapped performers and the brutalist castle,” Kjær said, going on to explain that the roses, more than being “a symbol for a new beginning,” were an insistence of one, “even though it can be hard in the times we live in now.”
Kjær studied sculpture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, but he comes from music and works across genres and media. (Fashion-friendly, he’s collaborated with Ganni.) Although the artist often engages with architecture (at times as a kind of set design), his work is anything but static—especially his site-specific performances.
To this attendee, the production for Shell in Brooklyn had a distinctive Euro flair—quite apart from the musical performance, arranged in collaboration with the Berlin-based art center Trauma. Crenellated towers aren’t native to the United States, nor are the WWII and Cold War bunkers that Kjær referenced, although the satellite dish was familiar. “I think the sculpture is sending something out, communicating something,” he said.
Its message? Affirmative, positive, and rooted in notions of togetherness. Even outside of his group performances, Kjær addresses the latter theme through his examination of nostalgia, a kind of collective memory that runs counter to the hollowness and isolation of the digital age. Indeed, Shell is designed to alter your course and make you engage—even if only for a moment.
Below, get to know the artist, who speaks about his training, vision, and resistance to being boxed-in.
Vogue: How did you get interested in art to begin with?
Esben Weile Kjær: Before I got into the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, I studied music management at the Danish Rhythmic Music Conservatorium, so I came more from music or nightlife, a mixed cultural background in relation to different genres. I’ve always been experimenting a lot with formats…
I got curated into some exhibitions when I was young, and I was thinking it was a bit funny why they thought I was an artist, because I didn’t understand myself as one. But after I showed works in these group shows in Copenhagen, then I found out that the art world was actually a place where I could do work without really having to categorize what I’m doing. In the beginning, that was what was so attractive about understanding myself as an artist and what I was doing as art, because it felt like a more free space without categories and boxes, somehow.
I was DJing a lot and I was experimenting with the DJ set in a more conceptual way, so it was more like sound art. And then I was writing poems and doing these T-shirts with my poems printed on them, and people started walking with them on the streets around Copenhagen. I guess that’s why I’ve always also had a foot inside of the fashion world, because my work somehow is so interested in being part of other kinds of spaces, like the catwalk or the nightclub. Somehow, my work can exist in these other places, and I kind of want them to. That’s also what I think is exciting about this show. Amant invited me to do an exhibition at this parking lot that is beside the galleries; it’s this kind of public space that I find really intriguing somehow.
How did studying at the Royal Academy change your perspective?
I applied to the Academy with the work that I was already doing—with a poster for a party and photo documentations. I was not trying to do formal sculptures. I got in, but the Art Academy in Copenhagen is six years, so the education got more formal. I’m educated from the sculpture department, so I think my work also got a more specific form in relation to material. I started working more in glass and bronze and steel. The Art Academy in Copenhagen is 300 years old…and so of course it also has a big legacy in relation to the tradition of sculpture and in a European context.
Tell us more about this castle you created for Amant.
It’s made out of a layer of concrete on top of a steel and wooden construction, so if you touch it, you can feel that it’s hollow; that’s why it’s called Shell. When you look at the photos, it looks heavy, it looks like something you could use in warfare, but if you knock on it, you can feel that it’s an empty shell of concrete. The hollowness is referencing film sets or theater sets—something that is temporary. That’s important because if it was all cast in concrete, it would just be miming warfare or violence in a specific way. But Shell is just miming it aesthetically, in its patina, so it’s a suggestion or a speculation more than something constant. It’s there for four months and then it’s not anymore—then something else can exist.
Maybe the concrete is a kind of garment.
Yeah, it is. It’s actually really beautiful to see it like that as a garment.
Nostalgia is a topic you engage with often, and one that I struggle with as an impediment to moving forward. Your castle seems to go backwards and forwards in time, as the crenelated turret can evoke the toys or fairy tales of youth, the leaning columns of the ancient world, and yet memory collides with the unknown somehow—also in the performance.
I think everything you can create is standing on the shoulders of what you have already seen or what you have already experienced. And from standing on the shoulders of that something you will create [something new], because a reproduction is also never a copy. It will always be something else in the context of the time. I think Shell is all about somehow questioning nostalgia; it’s like a remix of different kinds of architectures and monuments and places that have a specific function. Shell is in between a castle and a factory and a war bunker and a brutalist playground and a Soviet bus stop. It becomes this weird object where there’s a lot that you recognize as something you have seen before, but [it makes] you look at it in another way.
When you come into the lot, the castle looks like it has a function, but you don’t know for what. It’s too much form to actually be architecture, but also too practical to be a sculpture. It references so much, but in a way where it references so fast that it doesn’t reference anything completely, and that’s why it becomes something new. I think it’s a way of playing with memory, actually.
[Listening to what people said at the press preview it was clear that their memories were] activated. It was also uncanny to see Shell presented in a material like concrete, [which] has a huge legacy. So Shell becomes entertainment and violence, [with the two] somehow entangled into each other in this uncanny way that I’m interested in and have always been interested in. Because these symbols of power—the bunkers of Europe, the World War II bunkers and the Cold War bunkers—have been used so much by youth culture. So they shifted from being a symbol of war to one of progressive youth culture.
When I grew up, all the bunkers were places where punks and anarchists and young people hung out. When I was in New York for a residency, I went to a party in an empty skyscraper in the financial district, and that had also totally shifted from being a symbol of economy and Wall Street to a place where young people were dancing. I’m interested in when these symbols mutate and get free from their ideologies and become something else defined by the collective of the culture. And then there’s a lot to do with nostalgia, but it’s always also a lot to do with the future because the people living are defining what they mean and how they are getting used.
In an interview I saw, you explained how you document performances and then turned that imagery into stained glass. That idea of art begetting art, that the performance wasn’t just a fleeting thing but a starting place as well, was really interesting. And then you probably know that I’m obsessed with flatness, and with Warhol, who was concerned with how we consume everyday objects and images. Is nostalgia, which is a record of shared experiences, often through objects, your equivalent of flatness?
Completely. I think it’s also a fascination with energy. For example, many of my sculptures are inspired by key rings; key rings on bags in nightclubs. It’s not about consumption, it’s about style, it’s about culture, it’s about something you share with other people.
What I do with these stained glassworks is also taking these images that exist in youth culture and the youth culture I’m part of. A lot of the photographs that Freja Wewer is shooting of my performances I later turn into line drawings, which are transformed into stained glass. Of course, that is somehow a comment on the history of [European art]; stained glass is so connected to the churches, and the casinos and the absinthe bars in Paris, and all these spectacular spaces that have been facilitating different kinds of rituals and togetherness—people sharing experiences.
I’m interested in the super contemporary colliding with something really traditional—as stained glass for example, or a key ring being transformed into a bronze sculpture. That’s what I mean also with nostalgia; nostalgia is somehow colliding with the contemporary and the now and I think that is fascinating. The stained glass is a really analog way of taking light through an image. And every day when we are on Instagram, we look at images that light up through our phones and screens. [Stained glass] is the oldest screen, somehow.
These might be two very different things, but I was wondering how your work relates to childhood and to camp?
I think childhood and camp are also kind of connected. I think the childhood thing is about memory, because I’m interested in how we got socialized into society—so, what we got presented with as children. This specific sculpture in Brooklyn is inspired by the play castle you have as a kid. It’s a bit like a dollhouse—the castle version of it. It’s a way of socializing children to understand their function in society. And I think that’s why [toys] are really strong symbols also in an annoying way because they are gendered, for example. But there is a strange humor embedded in the choice because they don’t have a specific function, but they are miming being tools or they’re miming being practical, but they are only there for pleasure. I’m always fascinated about trying to bridge something practical and something that’s there for entertainment. And I’ve always been fascinated by workers in amusement parks, because they are facilitating entertainment but they’re also working. So these clashes of work and pleasure, and violence and entertainment, there’s something in between these that for me, becomes really calm and interesting. I’m navigating and remixing these symbols.
So many of the works are speculations; I mostly never understand the answer myself, and that’s always my goal—to do something because I don’t completely understand what it means, but I’m interested to figure it out. What will happen when I create things like the castle in Brooklyn, for example? That’s what I mean with speculation, because it becomes an experiment in a way. And that is a play. And children, they play, they build, they construct fantasy. They bridge the fantasy into specific performative rituals, we could call it, or games or plays. And I find that quite fascinating because it’s also a way of learning.
Going out at night is, I guess, a form of adult play.
No, completely. Being in a city is one big play.
Movement is an important part of your work. Did you study choreography?
No, not at all. I think I have a more conceptual approach to performance. I’m really formed by catwalks and music videos and scenes from Hollywood movies. I’m referencing pop culture a lot and in my performances…. The performances are miming different kinds of spectacles and combining them and then putting them inside of the art institution.
Does your Danish upbringing influence your work in any way?
I don’t know. When I’m in New York I always get so confronted with being from Scandinavia because American society is so different. I think growing up in Copenhagen, and growing up in Denmark, is maybe why I am playing with all these aesthetics. I’ll never feel completely attached to any of them because you feel a bit like you’re standing outside. [In Denamrk], we’re super-influenced by American pop culture, for example, but it’s always like an after echo somehow. Even though my work doesn’t look classically Scandinavian, I think it’s somehow really talking from a Scandinavian position. It’s actually difficult for me to see myself.
I’m curious about what freedom means to you, and how it’s expressed in what you do?
I did a work called Hardcore Freedom at Copenhagen Contemporary in 2020, and I’ve kept on showing that work, in Vienna and last year in Luxembourg. It’s a small reflection upon how freedom has been rated through music and culture and this [idea] of growing up in a society where this feeling of freedom was not existing. I started speculating [about if freedom] exists, or if you could only [experience it] as a desire. I think freedom is a desire, but I also think the closest we can come to freedom is togetherness and culture, because it was so clear during COVID-19 that the isolation was the opposite of an experience of freedom.
Where do you find meaning—or are you even looking for it?
No, not really. I think it’s [about] reflections. Since I was as a kid, I’ve always been questioning everything. I found it so difficult going to school because there was always an answer. I think my art practice [isn’t about] finding the answers, but only allowing myself to keep on reflecting and stay in the reflection. I think that’s also why I’m not so interested in good taste or bad taste; that will also change. Things get exciting for me when you can’t really say if something is beautiful or ugly—when these hierarchies of taste somehow [are challenged]. When you can’t define something as being extremely awkward or extremely beautiful, it’s a confusion, and then you can expand the idea of taste—that’s when things get interesting. Expanding your idea of things, that’s what has always fascinated me in looking at art or architecture or music or whatever.
Before we sign off, I have a question that goes back to the beginning: What music did you grow up listening to?
I’ve always been listening a lot to punk and then always to pop music. That was the big clash: this mass-produced pop music, and then this really niche Danish punk. I think that really reflects my taste, this pop brutalism.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
