Burn!

Performance

20 - 21 Oct 2022
19h - 19h20

22 - 23 Oct 2022
16h - 16h20

Forum –1

Centre Pompidou
Place Georges-Pompidou
75004 Paris

Esben Weile Kjær (1992) is an artist based in Copenhagen and Frankfurt. Spanning sculpture, video and performance, Esben Weile Kjær’s 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 raves, protests, press conferences, and ballets), but to become performative pop culture in its own right—often through interventions in public and commercialspaces, using props such as podiums, confetti cannons, fences, and party lasers.

His work has been shown at Museum Tinguely, Basel (Switzerland); Copenhagen Contemporary (Denmark); Den Frie, Copenhagen (Denmark); Ashley Berlin and Galerie der Gegenwart, Hamburg (Germany).

Broadcasted live on social networks and deployed at Forum-1 of the Center Pompidou, BURN! oscillates between energy and exhaustion. Seizing on a medium that is both fascinating and dangerous, fire, Esben Weile Kjær offers a spectacular and exhausting performance confronting several characters between them. With a choreography of gestures alternating embraces and veneers, he appropriates both the virile codes of firefighters while diverting them and those of pop culture and contemporary art.