Esben Weile Kjær, graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2022. Spanning sculpture, video and performance, his work draws on the history of pop culture and pop music to investigate themes of nostalgia, authenticity, and generational anxiety. In an attentive though reckless visual language, he investigates today’s event economy, often focusing on marketing tactics and the aesthetics of the entertainment industry – mainly to consider art’s relationship to its surrounding culture industries. As such, his work attempts to not only mimic other cultural modes of performance (such as those found in parties, protests, press conferences, and ballets), but to become performative pop culture in its own right—often through interventions in public and commercial spaces, using props such as podiums, confetti cannons, fences, and party lasers.
Esben Weile Kjær has had several solo shows, including at Kunsten - Museum of modern art, ARKEN - Museum of Contemporary Art, Kunstforeningen GL STRAND and at Copenhagen Contemporary, and has shown his works internationally at Museum Tinguely in Basel, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Mumok in Vienna, MMCA in South Korea and Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. In 2022, he received the Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen Foundation’s talent award and in 2023 the Aage & Ylva Nimbs Foundation Grant of honor.
"Fantasy!" 2020, painted bronze and glass, 130 x 35 x 35 cm. - Esben Weile Kjær
Fascinated by retromania, Esben Weile strives to demonstrate how nostalgia is employed as a marketing strategy. In our 100%-digital age, it seems that analogue versions of the objects we remember from our past have become talismans imbued with a kind of disruptive power. The pre-Millennial generations experience a kind of nostalgia for a host of little Chinese-manufactured plastic objects embodying the American Dream, symbols of a world that’s gone for good, banished by their growing awareness of the environmental challenges faced by the planet. The magic wand is one of these mass-produced items, a part of the artist’s childhood. By enlarging it, casting it in bronze and placing a glass star on its tip, he transforms this toy into a monument - a monument to childhood and the magic of childhood. Perhaps in 200 years’ time it will serve as a memorial to a lost civilization.
