Jesper Just (b. 1974, Denmark) uses the language of cinema to confront and divert the stereotypical Hollywood constructs of masculinity and femininity, as well as the biased representation of minorities and people with disabilities in mainstream culture. His short films and multi-projection video installations question the mechanisms of cinematic identification and break viewers’ expectations of narrative closure by unfolding surrealist, emotionally ambiguous, open-ended, and often silent situations or encounters. His use of lush, elaborated film scores plays a crucial part in creating an overall deceitful sense of narrative progression, and music rather than speech often serves as the sole means of communication between the protagonists of his unfathomable plots. Interested in how public and private spaces define and shape human interactions, Just further plays with the notion of architecture as performer, to echo and expand his characters’ enigmatic journeys.
Jesper Just has shown extensively around the world, representing Denmark at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, and with other notable solo exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Den Haag (The Hague), Des Moines Art Centre (Des Moines), BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (Gateshead), ARoS (Aarhus), the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (South Korea), as well as with the Perform15 performance biennial in Times Square (New York). In 2017, Just worked alongside the Royal Danish Ballet to create an original composition. In 2018, he opened another ballet with the American Ballet Theatre at Brooklyn Academy of Music (New York). His work can be found in the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Guggenheim Museum (New York), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Tate Modern (London), Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (Helsinki), Musée d’Art Moderne (Luxembourg), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul), the National Gallery of Denmark (Copenhagen), Arken Museum (Ishøj), ARoS (Aarhus), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Humlebæk) and Heart Herning Museum of Contemporary Art (Herning) among many others.
