Absalon Kirkeby, DK

Absalon Kirkeby holds an MFA from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, completed in 2014. Kirkeby is currently working in the field of photography and have published several photobooks since his debut book in 2009.

Kirkeby’s most recent book This is The Time won the Danish Design Book Award in 2024. The artistic practice of Kirkeby is involved in seeing and in transforming of what is seen into image. His exhibitions address hierarchies of what potentially can turn into image and of what experiences can suitably fashion the basis for a picture. Organic and inorganic bodies, and natural and cultural objects cross each other within a turbulent field.

There is a meditation on the context of human action, and social relationships are being scanned in a series of undulating moves between refuse, bodies, electricity, objects made by robots, metals, places and agendas. The pictures change system and objectivity, and observation is traversed by transitory conditions. There is a dissociation with real-time. Scenes of different tempi are juxtaposed, and the periphery is collocated with the staged. The camera’s precision, its realism and its automatic mechanism are set in contrast to the fictional and to a display of artistic choices. This is a body of work that operates with a translation from something learned and an artistic activity that examines the possibilities for something’s capacity to become a picture.