MILKY WAY by Esben Weile Kjær

In the organizer's words:

Trauma is pleased to announce the solo exhibition 'Milky Way' by Danish artist Esben Weile Kjær. In his cross-genre practice, which encompasses sculpture and performance, Kjær collides the visual vocabularies of entertainment, fashion and contemporary art. In doing so, he critically examines past and present youth cultural rituals.

In the central theater space of Trauma, Kjær has erected a large, walk-in concrete installation. This recalls two iconic and melancholic architectural typologies of the recent past: Soviet playgrounds and the characteristic World War II bunkers along the Western European coast, known as the Atlantic Wall. By inviting the public to climb the stairs and try out the built-in slide, the installation's austere, brutalist design is contrasted with a childlike playfulness. The outer wall of the bunker is adorned with neon works and glass windows. While the neon works depict fluorescent plants with diamond-studded flowers climbing up the outside of the building, the illuminated window motifs are inspired by NASA images showing the formation of new galaxies in the Milky Way. By colliding spatial and visual iconographies, Kjær confronts the status of past utopian visions in the sign of the eternally new: how dreams are objectified as aesthetics, how they inevitably fade and how they can reawaken and remind us (of something) again.

Can play be a mnemonic technique, an instrument of memory? Kjær's work raises the difficult question of how social rituals are historicized, forgotten or reduced to a mere image. His seemingly cavalier approach to cultural typologies is ultimately caught up in history: the Atlantic Wall was built by Germany along the occupied West Danish coast in the 1940s, in anticipation of an epic battle that ultimately took place elsewhere. Yet Kjær insists that these war relics, firmly embedded in the natural landscape, have naturally become available for radical practical and ideological reinterpretation. As a child, the artist experienced these bunkers as decontextualized and highly mysterious structures that invited exploration and play and served as a backdrop for countless youthful adventures. This symbolic recoding of architectural and natural environments is, of course, not unusual: Berlin's own history of transforming abandoned structures into community centers (parks, squads, clubs) testifies to the radical redefinition of physical spaces and their socio-political significance. In nightclubs - a long-standing object of the artist's research - the repurposing of spaces invites direct experimentation with social norms and reimagines the definition of public space. Kjær's work, however, implies that history always resonates in these materials - they are ghostly relics floating between different times and purposes.

Kjær creates ghostly environments by overlaying different but deeply familiar aesthetic tropes. Sources of inspiration for the stained glass windows of 'Milky Way' are not only medieval churches, but also strip clubs, casinos and absinthe bars in 1920s Paris - a heterogeneous assemblage of spaces that Walter Benjamin once referred to as 'dream houses'. These unexpected places of pleasure and devotion are characterized by a threshold atmosphere of social exchange and the performative. The pretty neon flowers growing up the façade of the bunker stand for growth and renewal - hackneyed clichés that are as common in consumer and entertainment spaces as they are in art. Kjær's symbols drift outwards from fixed semantic orders and mutate ambivalently into new decorative and economic purposes. Although art and architecture can capture and redirect them, they cannot fix them; they too are part of an eternal symbolic drift in a society of matter and media in flux. 'Milky Way' extends TRAUMA's curatorial mission to create alternatives to traditional club and gallery culture in Berlin and to explore the critical possibilities of hybrid sensory playgrounds of different kinds. Kjær's exhibition is a precursor to 'Solar System', a large-scale solo exhibition planned for October 2024 at the Kunsten Museum of Art in Aalborg, Denmark.

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