The Tamesis
Photo: Courtesy of Mark Hunter/The Cobrasnake
Who hasn’t dreamed of spending a night at a museum? The film versions of such adventures create a sense of quiet suspenseful containment. Danish prodigy and multimedia artist Esben Weile Kjær took a completely different and wanton approach when he opened his biennial of toaster performances at Den Frie Udstilling in Copenhagen, kicking things off with a new version of “hardcore freedom”. This piece brings a party into the museum space. In this iteration, after several hours of free dance performances, attendees were able to dance to the music of DJ Courtesy and Europa.
Debuting at the Copenhagen Contemporary Art Fair in 2020, “Hardcore Freedom” took place over three months, with the detritus of nonsense – empty bottles, cigarette butts, lost clothing, confetti – accumulating over time. In addition to exposing “the essence of social interaction,” Weile Kjær says, “I also wanted to deal in some way with the emptiness of the word freedom, which we are constantly exposed to, or we see it everywhere… What does it really mean? Is it just a fantasy? How does it feel?”
In 2020, Weile Kjær was just starting out; six years later, he’s an art world darling. He chose not to perform it himself, he says, because “I wanted to pass it on to the next generation in some way, so I set out to cast the next generation of young people in Copenhagen who were defining nightlife, culture and image. The show, which attracted an audience of 1,600 and lasted more than four hours, featured self-styled dancers writhing on a checkerboard floor lit up around 1980s (shades of Gavin Brown’s late New York’s Passenger Bar in York), paid for by a collector and shipped from Sweden to Denmark.
As a teenager growing up in Aarhus, Weile Kjær was keen to follow The Cobrasnake Mark Hunter’s documentation of the Los Angeles and New York nightlife scenes, which gave birth to the indie grimy aesthetic, so having the photographer capture the action in Copenhagen was a bit of wish fulfillment. These new photos, some of which look like they could be from 2012, show that mid-2000s aesthetics weren’t limited. “I think the interesting thing about culture is that it’s always an echo, this nostalgic echo, throughout history,” Weile Kjær said.
