Artists

Esben Weile Kjær

Press release

TRAUMA is pleased to present Milky Way, a solo exhibition by Danish artist Esben Weile Kjær. Kjær’s multidisciplinary work across sculpture and performance clashes the visual vocabularies of entertainment, fashion, and contemporary art in a critical investigation of youth-cultural rituals past and present.

In TRAUMA’s central theatre space, Kjær has erected a large, navigable concrete structure that recalls two iconic, if melancholic, architectural typologies from the recent past: Soviet playgrounds and the quintessential WW2 bunkers along the West European coastline (known officially as the Atlantic Wall). The severe brutalist design of the artist’s construction is contrasted by a child-like playfulness, inviting audiences to climb the structure via its stairs or to try its built-in slide. The bunker’s exterior is embellished by several neon works on the building’s exterior and several stained-glass windows. While the neon works display fluorescent plants with diamond-crusted flowers crawling up the building’s exterior, the windows’ illuminated motifs are inspired by NASA imagery of new galaxies forming in the Milky Way. In this clash of spatial and visual iconographies, Kjær explores the status of bygone utopian visions under the sign of the perpetual new: how dreams are made material as aesthetics, how they inevitably fade, and how they might reawaken and remind us (of something) anew.

Curated by Madalina Stanescu