Artist group A Kassen’s practice is first and foremost an exploration of the relationship between form and content. Beginning with an object or an element, such as an everyday object, a material such as bronze, or something more ephemeral like a puddle or a reflection, A Kassen task themselves with acts of construction and deconstruction, with reinterpretation and re-contextualisation, against the backdrop of questioning our preconceived notions of what the phenomenon in question really is.
Through these manipulations, A Kassen create works that are necessarily meant to be seen through the context of art and aesthetics. It is not so much a question of what happens when these works are placed within an institutional art setting, but rather what happens when we take something that we have come to see as ordinary or mundane, and see it through the lens of “art”. With this in mind, the role of the spectator becomes central. Conceived as an integral part of the work, we become interpreters, creating layers of meaning and understanding for each of the works, as we re-write their narratives.
Graduates of the Royal Academy of Denmark, Copenhagen-based A Kassen have been collaborating since 2004. Since then, they have exhibited extensively. They have had recent solo shows at the National Gallery of Iceland (Reykjavik), and Den Frie (Copenhagen), Sorø Kunstmuseum (Sorø) and KØS (Køge). They have also shown at ARoS (Aarhus), ARTIPELAG (Gustavsberg), Copenhagen Contemporary (Copenhagen), UMOCA (Salt Lake City), and the Museum of Mexico City (Mexico City) among many others. They participated in the 2009 Momentum Nordic Biennial for Contemporary Art. In the last ten years, A Kassen have completed many permanent installations worldwide, notably at Kistefos Museum sculpture park (Jevnaker), the Danish embassy in New Delhi (India), in the cities of Aarhus (Denmark), Vejle (Denmark) and Lund (Sweden) among others.
