I understand you both are coming from creative artistic backgrounds. Could you tell us more and how you got together and founded this duo?
We met in a nightclub in Copenhagen in 1994 when Michael was writing poetry and Ingar was in theater and soon became partners. Not long after that we started doing performance art together and our collaboration grew from there really. We never knew it would become a life-long alliance – we didn’t have a plan or strategy in place when we started experimenting. And as neither of us had formal art educations, our path as an artist duo has been rather intuition-led, with our dialogue being a really steadfast component in our approach.
As multidisciplinary artists, how would you describe your practice?
We easily get bored. We try to avoid being too repetitive and too well-known for one thing or another and the variety in our work is perhaps testament to that. If we had to be specific, we’d probably say that our sculptural practice is the most manifest, but there again our installations and performative elements tie so closely with our sculptures when we create whole environments… Thematically, our work tends to hone in on emotional states or states of mind, often relating to notions of identity, loneliness or looking at the boundaries between public and private spaces, and how people’s behaviours change accordingly.
Where do you usually come from with your concepts? Would you refer your work to politics?
We might find inspiration from news articles or political discourses, books, architecture, or films, but the trigger for a work often happens in the dialogue between us after having heard, read, or seen something. Through further conversations we refine concepts until they feel sturdy enough to be brought to life. In terms of political reference, we often touch upon themes that might be on the general political agenda, but we do generally believe that art is better at posing questions than proclaiming truths and trumpet solutions.
Please name some artists, actors, writers or architects you might be inspired by and tell us the reason why?
There’s too many to mention specifically, but Minimalism was certainly formative in how we developed our practice, with Felix Gonzalez Torres being perhaps the most influential artist, since he managed to elegantly subvert Minimalism. The intricate balance between personal and political issues in his work, iterated through a pared down visual language was very inspiring to us as we started out. Michel Foucault has been an important thinker for us too, particularly his theories on power and social structures. Our ongoing “Powerless Structures” series of works pay homage to this in a way. And Samuel Beckett has been inspirational to us in multiple ways, most importantly because of his acerbic perspective on human life and the way he harnesses the absurd. We find that absurd humor is often a perfect tool for addressing existential matters and subverting perceptions of social structures or conventions.
Often, we see children represented in your installations, is there a reference to yourself or generally to the past?
Childhood is a theme that recurs through our work of the past ten years or so. It’s a complicated time in many people’s lives emotionally that has a huge impact on who we become later in life. We both felt we didn’t really fit in when we were little, as if we had landed in the wrong place or something to that extent. The insecurities felt as a child, the daunting perceived vastness, and complexities of the world, recurs often, later in adulthood, not least in a reality that seems to be shifting more than ever in history. We’ve therefore been interested in looking at what it means to be ‘growing up’. One early childhood themed sculpture was “High Expectations: (2010), where a crouching figure of a boy seems to be hiding inside a grand fireplace, where a representational painted portrait of him is hanging above the mantel.