For the opening night of MILKY WAY, we are excited to host this line-up of underground music trailblazers: Uffie (live), New York (live), DJ Trick and Europa.
Graphic by William Becker
For the opening night of MILKY WAY, we are excited to host Uffie (live), New York (live), DJ Trick and Europa.
Embracing themes of nostalgia and youth, Esben Weile Kjær’s installation will be paired with performances that each offer their own distinctive take on pop culture, art, satire and indie revival. The evening kicks off at 8pm with the MILKY WAY official soundscape, composed by frequent collaborator Europa, followed by his DJ set. The night then transitions to the club, featuring a live set by the electronica duo New York and a performance from bloghouse icon Uffie, culminating in a two-hour closing set from DJ Trick, the ringleader of Club Cringe and one of NYC’s finest!
Doors at 20:00
About the exhibition:
TRAUMA is pleased to present Milky Way, a solo exhibition by Danish artist Esben Weile Kjær. Kjær’s multidisciplinary work across sculpture and performance clashes the visual vocabularies of entertainment, fashion, and contemporary art in a critical investigation of youth-cultural rituals past and present.
In TRAUMA’s theatre space, Kjær has erected a large, navigable concrete structure that recalls two iconic, if melancholic, architectural typologies from the recent past: Soviet playgrounds and the quintessential WW2 bunkers along the West European coastline (known officially as the Atlantic Wall). The severe brutalist design of the artist’s construction is contrasted by a child-like playfulness, inviting audiences to climb the structure via its stairs or to try its built-in slide. The bunker’s exterior is embellished by several neon works on the building’s exterior and several stained-glass windows. While the neon works display fluorescent plants with diamond-crusted flowers crawling up the building’s exterior, the windows’ illuminated motifs are inspired by NASA imagery of new galaxies forming in the Milky Way. In this clash of spatial and visual iconographies, Kjær explores the status of bygone utopian visions under the sign of the perpetual new: how dreams are made material as aesthetics, how they inevitably fade, and how they might reawaken and remind us (of something) anew.
The show is part of Berlin Art Week 2024 Featured Section