Indie Sleaze Is Thriving in Copenhagen: See The Cobrasnake’s Photos of Esben Weile Kjær’s Performance Piece
Who hasn’t dreamt of a night at the museum? Movie versions of such adventures build up a hushed and suspenseful feeling of containment. Danish wunderkind, the multimedia artist Esben Weile Kjær, took an entirely different, and wanton, tack to the trope when he kicked off the Toaster Performance Biennale in Copenhagen at Den Frie Udstilling with a new version of “Hardcore Freedom.” This piece brings a party into a museum space. In this iteration, after a several-hour freeform dance performance attendees were able to hit the floor and dance to sets by DJs Courtesy and Europa.
“Hardcore Freedom” debuted at Copenhagen Contemporary in 2020 where it unfolded over three months, with the detritus of raving—empty bottles, cigarette butts, lost items of clothing, confetti—accumulating over time. Beyond exposing “the material of social interactions,” says Weile Kjær, “I wanted to somehow deal with this emptiness of the word freedom that we’re exposed to so much or we’re seeing everywhere…. What does it actually mean? Is it only a fantasy? How does this feel?”
In 2020 Weile Kjær was just starting out; six years later he’s an art-world darling. He chose not to perform himself because, he said, “I wanted to somehow give it to the next generation, so I started to cast the next generation of young people in Copenhagen that are defining nightlife and culture and images. The performance, which drew 1,600 people, unfolded over four hours as self-styled dancers writhed over a circa-1980s lit-up chessboard floor (shades of Gavin Brown’s late, lamented Passerby bar in New York) that was paid for by a collectsor and driven to Denmark from Sweden.
As a teenager growing up in Aarhus, Weile Kjær avidly followed The Cobrasnake Mark Hunter’s documentation of Los Angeles and New York nightlife scenes, which birthed indie sleaze aesthetics, so it was wish fulfillment to have the photographer capture the action in Copenhagen. These new images, some of which look like they could be dated 2012, show that the mid-2000s aesthetic has no curfew. Said Weile Kjær: “I think what is so interesting about culture is that it’s always an echo, this nostalgic echo, going through history.”
