Meet Esben Weile Kjær, the Danish Artist Who Constructed a Castle in a Parking Lot in Willamsburg

Vogue

2 days ago

Yes, Esben Weile Kjær is 6'5' with blue eyes, but he's a man in fine art rather than finance—and the world is better off for it. The ascent of this 33-year-old Dane has been breathtaking, but the artist, a man at ease with himself, is taking it all in stride.
His latest adventure takes place in a parking lot in East Williamsburg, where, at the invitation of Amant, he constructed Shell, a concrete-covered wooden edifice that Frankesteins together, he explained on the phone, 'a castle and a factory and a war bunker and a brutalist playground [and] a Soviet bus stop.' The hollowness of the building is intentional; part of its function was as a proscenium for a one-night only performance. On the far side of Shell, to a soundtrack by fellow Dane Loke Rahbek (known as Croatian Amor), Kjær recently gathered 1,000 white roses and four local performers, who joined him in running out from the castle to strew flowers on the ground and attach some of them to their bodies with packing tape. The chorography had a dance-like-nobody's-watching vibe, which saw the group writhing, bending like Gumby, air boxing, and 'eating' flowers, while sparkle machines intermittently shot columns of light into the appropriately dramatic cloudy sky. 'I love that they put glitter into the air around the trapped performers and the brutalist castle,' Kjær said, going on to explain that the roses, more than being 'a symbol for a new beginning,' were an insistence of one, 'even though it can be hard in the times we live in now.'
Kjær studied sculpture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, but he comes from music and works across genres and media. (Fashion-friendly, he's collaborated with Ganni.) Although the artist often engages with architecture (at times as a kind of set design), his work is anything but static—especially his site-specific performances.
To this attendee, the production for Shell in Brooklyn had a distinctive Euro flair—quite apart from the musical performance, arranged in collaboration with the Berlin-based art center Trauma. Crenellated towers aren't native to the United States, nor are the WWII and Cold War bunkers that Kjær referenced, although the satellite dish was familiar. 'I think the sculpture is sending something out, communicating something,' he said.
Its message? Affirmative, positive, and rooted in notions of togetherness. Even outside of his group performances, Kjær addresses the latter theme through his examination of nostalgia, a kind of collective memory that runs counter to the hollowness and isolation of the digital age. Indeed, Shell is designed to alter your course and make you engage—even if only for a moment.