Esben Weile Kjær „thousands of small explosions at the same time“

Esben Weile Kjær practice operates within the logic of contemporary Western self-optimization, high-gloss desire, and the relentless pursuit of aesthetic perfection. In thousands of small explosions at the same time, Weile Kjær mirrors a contemporaneity obsessed with visibility, display, and endless surface manipulation. It thrives in the hyper-now, reflecting the quiet violence of neoliberal self-surveillance, where submission can be mistaken for empowerment. For the context of Salzburger Kunstverein Weile Kjær created a sculptural scenario that collapses Rococo decadence into digital overstimulation, producing an uncanny landscape where the body is both a commodity and an avatar.

Alongside the exhibition, the performance DEEPFAKE utilizes the Salzburg Festival’s costume archive as a stage of glitchy déjà vu. Historic garments are worn and looped through by performers trained in physical theatre, mimicking the repetition and absurdity of meme culture.

In this exhibition, the artist intentionally enters a dialogue with the artistic practice of Laila Shawa whose works are presented in parallel in the Studio space. Shawa’s Breast Bombs—sculptural forms that merge prosthetic breast molds with the aesthetics of explosive devices—are embedded directly into Weile Kjær’s scenario in the Grand Hall. Positioned inside mirrored display boxes, the Breast Bombs are refracted into a kaleidoscopic field of shifting perspectives, underscoring themes of multiplicity, fragmentation, and the impossibility of a single point of view. The insertion of Shawa’s work produces a kind of multi-exposure—a layered image where histories bleed into one another, and where aesthetic seduction masks deeper undercurrents of violence and control. It is a deliberate collision—or perhaps better: a choreography of a thousand small explosions happening all at once.

Both artists operate on the terrain of bodies as surfaces under pressure: trained, adorned, fragmented, repurposed. And yet, their temporal and political coordinates differ radically. Shawa’s sculptures carry the weight of Palestine’s political history, her stance against religious fundamentalism, and the female body’s role in nationalist conflicts. Weile Kjær confronts the neoliberal present, where the commodified self is endlessly optimized, spectacularized, and staged for consumption.

CURATED BY Mirela Baciak.

OPENING: 25 July 2025, 8:00 PM

9:00 PM Performance DEEPFAKE by Esben Weile Kjær co-produced with Salzburger Festspiele, co-curated with Elisabeth Oberleitner.

7:00 PM ARTIST TALK poptimism
Esben Weile Kjær, Jakub Gawkowski, and Mirela Baciak in conversation with Greta Rainbow (Writer-in-Residence SKV x Spike). In collaboration with Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts.

10:30 PM - 1:00 AM DJ Set & Dancefloor Session with Seba Kayan
in the garden of the Salzburger Kunstverein

* The performance DEEPFAKE will also be shown as part of the Salzburg Festival’s opening celebrations on 19 July at 5:30 pm, 7:30 pm and 9:00 pm (Free admission tickets will be available online from 5 July via the Salzburg Festival website).

Esben Weile Kjær (*1992, Copenhagen) is an artist based in Copenhagen. 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 parties, protests, press conferences, and ballets), but to become performative pop culture in its own right—often through interventions in public and commercial spaces, using props such as podiums, confetti cannons, fences, and party lasers.