With the title Passage, Kunsthal Aarhus and Det Jyske Kunstakademi celebrate a 20-year-long collaboration with a focus on newly graduated artists.

This year marks the anniversary of the traditional collaboration between Kunsthal Aarhus and Det Jyske Kunstakademi. The graduation exhibition, Passage, presents works by graduating students Benjamin Asger Krog Møller (b. 1994) and Naja Zethner (b. 1998) in two galleries. This is the twentieth time that the graduation exhibition is presented at Kunsthal Aarhus.
 
Preview:
Saturday 20.04.2024

This year's graduation exhibition is titled Passage and refers to the transitions we experience throughout our lives. The exhibition dwells on both large and small transitions, reflecting on their significance and asking the question: What happens when we move from one stage to another? The exhibition also invites the audience to be open to a process of change where you look at art and the circumstances surrounding its creation.

In Passage, which consists of a series of paintings by Zethner and an installation by Krog Møller, their works fill galleries 2 and 3 on the ground floor of Kunsthal Aarhus.

Visual artist Naja Zethner works with painting and text, with which she investigates sensory impressions, scores, structure formation and imagings. On soft cotton canvases and pages where language moves and breathes, a strongly formalist ambivalence is expressed in the translucent strokes and the words' body-poetic investigations of aesthetic phenomena. As in a painter's exaggerated microscopy, the image is examined as a persistent living system, reflecting her engagement with contemporary ecology, choreography, image theory and culture.

Benjamin Asger Krog Møller is a visual artist and idea-historian working with installation, text and collaborative work. In an artistic approach to extremal combinatorics, a distinctive intervening form of immanent institutional critique and all-encompassing slapstick archival aesthetics is created, which rummages in all forms of (visual) language, knowledge and text in both the digital and the analogue.
Remarkable artistic and idea-historical movements in an international, but especially also in a local Aarhusian perspective, are examined in various forms of institutionalization, interdisciplinary history falsification and sometimes chaos apocalyptic makings of fiction.
His work is made through countless group subjects and collaborations, including the outreaching book project school art & art schools (2019- Selina Rom Andersen, Lina Brogaard Ottosen, Maj Færgemann), The Institute of Emancipatory Science (2017–) and the artist group and anagram Computer Lars (2022- collaboration with the late French writer Marcel Proust), both of which are made with philosopher Asker Bryld Staunæs as well as Organ of The Autonomous Sciences (2020- Asker Bryld Staunæs, Tobias Dias), an extra-disciplinary collective for research, art and infrastructural organization.

Karen Vestergaard Andersen is a Danish art historian and independent curator engaged in intersectional feminist practices, somaesthetics and new materialist knowledge and exhibition production within the field of contemporary art.
Co-founder of bluestockings (bs), a collaborative platform and partnership with curator Helen Nishijo. (bs) forms a knowledge and practice based community within contemporary art centered around critical ecofeminism, solidarity practices, spiritualism and civil rights activism in a transcultural perspective. In addition, she is co-founder of the collective project SOMATIK and former co-director of ARIEL – Feminisms in The Aesthetics.

The exhibition is generously supported by:
Aarhus Municipality, The Danish Arts Foundation, Augustinus Foundation, 15. Juni Foundation, Per og Lise Aarsleff Fund, Dyrup