Bio
Kasper Hesselbjerg (1985) lives and works in Copenhagen. He holds an MFA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. His artistic practice involves writing, conversations over a cup of tea, studying Hanzi, making collages or “image atlases,” edible sculptures, and performative dinner exhibitions.
Recurrent themes in his works are semiotics, bodily experiences, affect, and the premises of meaning. Here, food is often employed to stress the interrelation between the sensuous and the symbolic. By examining “eating discourses,” Hesselbjerg shows how food reify our connectedness with the cosmos, or a cosmology.
When digested and contemplated carefully his work questions with both humour and subtlety the colonial-capitalist episteme and the naturalisation of its cosmological functions. He prefers working three days a week, and not at all in May.
Besides having produced gallery and museum exhibitions in Denmark and abroad, Hesselbjerg is the author of various books. Currently, he is working on the project Cooking Your Spirit Animal, which discusses cultural appropriation, self-consummation, and our connectedness with other humans and non-humans.
Hesselbjerg has received several grants of honour. He is highly enthusiastic about ambivalence and indeterminacy. He is also the founder and editor of the publishing house emancipa(t/ss)ionsfrugten with fellow artist Absalon Kirkeby.
Articles, press and interviews
“Kasper Hesselbjerg’s work is centred around three fundamental components: sculpture, text and last but not least food. All the elements are tied together, sculpture is food, food is sculpture, and to connect the dots Hesselbjerg often uses collage, language, and books as the umami in his recipe for art. As a prime example of the later can be found in his book recently published Recipe for Snails and Success.
Over the last few years Hesselbjerg has developed a visual food “atlas.” An atlas that triggers the taste buds with visual grace, combining the grotesque and absurd with simplicity and lightness. The food is often presented on elegant, unique ceramic plates or bowls, however Hesselbjerg is not afraid of mixing high-end food products with products that usually would be considered cheesy and cheap. A wood sculpture representing a wavy fry, porcelain ears filled with mussels, an alphabet made of cereals, a failproof recipe for cooking snails and a mysterious cocktail based on mushrooms are a few examples of Hesselbjerg’s body of work. Unorthodoxly the artist spears a marshmallow and a cornichon as a side in a tea ceremony, which ads odd textures, colors, flavours and awakens our senses.
Hesselbjerg works across a wide variety of media, travelling from text to collage, passing by sculpture and eccentric culinary experiments, on an endless journey to question the construction of meaning. His practice is thus inevitably connected to semiotics, which revolves around the study of sign production and interpretation. He often injects his artworks with double meanings or paradoxes, an ambiguity he plays with and voluntarily combines with ideological constructions and bias.
His practice goes back and forth between the realm of the real and the realm of the imaginary, incorporating elements of philosophy, art history and sociology to an ever-changing recipe for reflection. Food is a red thread that runs through his work as a subject of research, as a tool of analyzes and as a mean of concealment or revelation. Another thread is books. Together with fellow artist Absalon Kirkeby, he runs the publishing project emancipa(t/ss)ionsfrugten, where they collaborate with artists and writers, translate and publish books.”
Art Sonje Center, Jacob Fabricius: Minimalism-Maximalism-Mechanissmmm Act 3–Act 4, 2022
