Showcase
04.09.24 – 01.12.24

In late August 2024, Art Hub Copenhagen (AHC) sent Esben Weile Kjær, Miriam Kongstad, Eliyah Mesayer and Filip Vest off to South Korea, where they presented performance works at the national museum’s major performance festival in Seoul and represent Denmark at the new Danish Pavilion at the Gwangju Biennale.

The artists selected share a strong interest in performance and use it regularly as a manifold tool and vital element in their general practice. Each artist has a unique approach to performance, and whether engaging their own bodies or instructing others, their works grapple with important issues including identity, spirituality, queerness, care, sexuality, community, pain, freedom, capitalism, and desires in the 21st century.

During two-day live-act presentations at MMCA Performing Arts in Seoul, the artists present mostly new, or updated versions of older performances. Esben Weile Kjær, renowned in Denmark for his ecstatic performances exploring the party as a phenomenon, presents a new version of his ballet work COLLIDER!, which deals with exhaustion, effort, and the moment just before the body collapses. Miriam Kongstad debuts her new work HARD PLAY, a choreographic performance examining children’s play and its role in our conditioning to perform (gender) identities and social norms from an early age.

Filip Vest will present their new work Self Tape, featuring an androgynous figure—part monster, part pop princess—who struggles breathlessly to find a role to play in late capitalist society. Eliyah Mesayer likewise creates an imaginary space with her performance Ask The Oracle, performing as an oracle the audience can interact with through questions, dream narratives, or simply by being present.

The selected works at the exhibition Showcase in the Danish pavilion are all closely linked to the performances that the artists presented at MMCA in Seoul. Here, they explore the intersection between performance, video and sculpture. The works are all new sculptural works commissioned by Art Hub Copenhagen and curated by AHC’s artistic director, Jacob Fabricius and freelance curator Maria Kjær Themsen.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

ESBEN WEILE KJÆR (DK, 1992) graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, in 2022. He also has a background as a DJ and a degree in Music Management from the Rhythmic Music Conservatory (RMC). In his performances, installations and sculptures, he examines identity among his own generation and explores the role of popular culture and technology in determining our experience of community and freedom.

MIRIAM KONGSTAD (DK, 1991) is a visual artist and choreographer based in Berlin (DE) and Copenhagen (DK). Materialized as images, performance, sculpture, text, and sound, Kongstad’s practice is anchored in explorations of embodiment, identity, and social codes. By articulating often ambivalent and complex aspects of life, such as health, sexuality, pain, and desire, the human body is explored as a metaphysical, organic, social, and spiritual entity – an expanded experience of being flesh.

FILIP VEST (DK. 1995) holds an MFA from Malmö Art Academy. Through performances, installations, films, and texts, they examine queer love, loneliness, and desire in the 21st century. Applying rehearsal methods from theatre, they test the relationship between the script and the body to investigate the different ways we perform our identities and relations. Vest’s universe is inhabited by a vast network of things of different scales, each affecting the other: climate change and crumbling relationships, role play, doomsday karaoke and re-enacted kisses, a bird falling in love with a statue, and a frog having a breakdown in the middle of a striptease. Through mobile phones, walls and windows, the characters communicate and miscommunicate across species and time while attempting to make themselves legible to each other.

ELIYAH MESAYER (DK, 1987) graduated from the Jutland Art Academy, Denmark, in 2020. She is based in Copenhagen. Eliyah Mesayer’s practice is primarily expressed through an alchemical tradition. Her form of alchemy isn’t limited to alchemical works on paper, but also extends into poetry, installation, and performative works. Mesayer’s fictional state Illiyeen, a state for the stateless, which both engages her own heritage, but also seeks a form of alchemical change by artistically balancing itself on the dynamic threshold between reality and fiction.

MORE INFO

MMCA
4 – 5 September 2024, performances
6 September 2024, talk

Gwangju Biennale
8 September – 1 December 2024
Opening hours: 10:00AM–6:00PM, closed on Mondays
7 September, press and VIP opening

See more images from the MMCA performances and the Gwangju Biennial here.

The four artists were selected by AHC and were at the MMCA performance festival together with four South Korean artists who will come to Denmark and exhibit in the spring of 2025. The project in South Korea is generously supported by the Danish Arts Foundation and the Danish Agency for Culture and Palaces.