A conversation with A Kassen about their exhibition at Galleri Nicolai Wallner ‘Composition / Hostile’ in 2025.

In Composition / Hostile, A Kassen transform the gallery space from its supposedly neutral state into an potentially unnerving, destabilising landscape for the audience to navigate. Part participatory sculpture, part readymade, the exhibition features an installation made up of over 800 concrete elements. Roughly hewn and placed wall to wall, with just enough space to step between, the work awakens the body to its natural desires and patterns. Constriction and interruption draw the attention inwards, in a space where attention is often directed outward. In their subtle and mischievous way, A Kassen have turned the experience of the gallery space inside out.

For this work A Kassen engage with the aesthetics of the minimalist tradition of seriality and the grid. Unlike the minimalists however, this work invites the audience physically into the work, and allows for imperfections to arise. In doing so, A Kassen poke and pull at the authority of minimalism in a manner that inspires curiosity and playfulness.

Another site of authority that A Kassen often interrupt is that of architecture. At Sundbyskolan, Stockholm, A Kassen used common structures of the school playground, but twisting and turning them, repeating and layering them, distorting the architectural reality, bringing a subtle psychotomimetic vision to daily life. This subversion of urban and architectural norms recalls the radical spatial experiments of Gordon Matta-Clark, whose interventions into the built environment exposed the fragility of architectural stability and our reliance on it. ECHO (2024), a public commission for Hudiksvall hospital in Sweden, repeats the utilitarian architecture to an absurd degree, resulting in a surprising playfulness found in a site often bereft of play. Scale is exploited in the more obviously cheerful work ENDLESS LAMPPOST (2022) at Herning Station, where an ordinary lamppost stretches 32 metres into the sky.

It is with these architectural ruptures and subtle plays on art history that A Kassen reawaken the viewer to the structures around them, opening up the imagination of what could be. By situating a trope of hostile architecture within the gallery space, forms that may have been used to warn and deter become an invitation to explore how the body reacts to a corruption of a space. In Composition / Hostile, A Kassen continue to take the recognisable and in altering it slightly, reconceptualise the preconditioned roles and relationship we have to the space and to social conventions.

Graduates of the Royal Academy of Denmark, the Copenhagen-based artist group A Kassen have been collaborating since 2004. Since then, they have exhibited extensively. They have had solo shows with the National Gallery of Iceland (Reykjavik), and Den Frie (Copenhagen), Sorø Kunstmuseum (Sweden) and KØS (now MAPS in Køge). A Kassen have shown at ARoS (Aarhus), ARTIPELAG (Gustavsberg), Copenhagen Contemporary, UMOCA (Salt Lake City), and the Museum of Mexico City, among many others. They participated in the 2009 Momentum Nordic Biennial for Contemporary Art. In the last ten years, A Kassen have created many permanent installations worldwide, notably at Kistefos Museum sculpture park (Norway), the Danish embassy in New Delhi (India), and in the cities of Aarhus (Denmark), Vejle (Denmark) and Lund (Sweden) among others. Their works are in the permanent collections of Malmø Kunstmuseum, Kunsten Aalborg, Brandts Museum and among others.