Esben Weile Kjær b. 1992

SHELL, Amant, Brooklyn, NY, USA, May 31 - September 28 2025

With two monumental golden rats, Esben Weile Kjær brings an unexpected sense of wonder to Asiat Park, transforming the space into a place where symbolism and identity are turned upside down. The work explores hierarchy and materiality. Unlike traditional monuments made of marble or silver, these sculptures are created from gold fabric and filled with air. They are glamorous and temporary, like a party, like makeup, like power itself.

Lions have historically stood for power and authority, appearing on imperial emblems and statues in front of wealthy homes and on coins. Here, two rats take center stage as a queer symbol, stepping into the role of lions. Like queer communities, rats have existed on the fringes of society yet remain adaptable and resilient. Their association with transformation and fluidity reflects how queer identities challenge and reshape traditional norms.Asiat Park, a former military site that stood vacant for ten years (2008–2018), is now a place where people gather for culture, connection, and leisure. In a park where once-abandoned buildings are now largely reinhabited and rented out, Weile Kjær elevates this often unwanted byproduct of urban vitality to the status of monument, an homage to the unplanned consequences of social revival. Esben Weile Kjær plays with the idea of a creature often regarded as undesirable, hidden in the shadows of human presence, but here brought into the spotlight. The rats are monumental figures, not pushed aside, but elevated and made visible.

Kjær’s multidisciplinary work across sculpture and performance clashes the visual vocabularies of entertainment, fashion, and contemporary art in a critical investigation of youth-cultural rituals past and present. For MILKY WAY, Kjær has erected a large, navigable concrete structure that recalls two iconic, if melancholic, architectural typologies from the recent past: Soviet playgrounds and the quintessential WW2 bunkers along the West European coastline (known officially as the Atlantic Wall).

The severe brutalist design of the artist’s construction is contrasted by a child-like playfulness, inviting audiences to climb the structure via its stairs or to try its built-in slide. The bunker’s exterior is embellished by several neon works on the building’s exterior and several stained-glass windows. While the neon works display fluorescent plants with diamond-crusted flowers crawling up the building’s exterior, the windows’ illuminated motifs are inspired by NASA imagery of new galaxies forming in the Milky Way. In this clash of spatial and visual iconographies, Kjær explores the status of bygone utopian visions under the sign of the perpetual new: how dreams are made material as aesthetics, how they inevitably fade, and how they might reawaken and remind us (of something) anew. The exhibition was presented as part of the Featured Section of Berlin Art Week 2024.