HONORARY AWARD: KAREN KJÆRGAARD IS CREATING THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE MOMENT

Curator Karen Kjærgaard will be receiving Nykredit’s 2023 Honorary Award for her long-standing work with exhibitions at the intersection of art, design and architecture. Impact and humour were always her game.

26.04.2023

On 8 May, Karen Kjærgaard will be awarded Nykredit’s Honorary Award (Nykredits Hæderspris) in recognition of her long-standing efforts as a curator and her exemplary way of presenting the complexity and diversity of architecture. Her work has resulted in more than 100 exhibitions since 1987 – the year she graduated in architecture. But she actually created her very first exhibition during her childhood in Ringkjøbing – way back in the 1960s.

A competition on which store could create the best Christmas display had been arranged. And 12-year-old Karen suggested to her father, a butcher, that they could exhibit her dressed up as a Christmas “pixie” in the shop’s refrigerated window, along with the word ‘homemade’. This exhibition had several of the characteristics Karen has been repeating in her work ever since – and it took the first prize.

Karen Kjærgaard in front of Aarhus School of Architecture and ONSITE Gallery. She is going to receive Nykredit's Honorary Award on 8 May 2023.

‘I can’t help but add a little detail: doing it with edginess and love. The thing that completes it. In the butcher’s shop, there had to be a goal or a motivation. Just as there has to be a goal or a motivation when, at Aarhus School of Architecture, she arranges the architecture festival OPEN. We need to have a purpose with architecture’, Karen Kjærgaard says about her way of practising architecture.

OPEN – a new opportunity

As the curator responsible for Aarhus School of Architecture’s annual exhibition and showcase to the world, the OPEN architecture festival, Karen Kjærgaard has, so far, achieved her professional zenith – or at least a professional state of zen in which she is comfortable.

‘The opening of the new school building and the decision to arrange an annual festival have given me new challenges and a unique platform where it is not just a matter of conveying information and didactic results, but also about creating new knowledge while interacting with a large audience. A place where my work as a curator can unfold and develop further – and, in the case of OPEN, working together with younger co-curators. Somewhere I can bring my master in curating and my network into play’, she says.

Her master helped her express her work in words and text; work that has spanned several decades. First, as an “exhibition architect” and, later, as a, more knowledge-based, “curator”.

‘In contrast with the world of the arts, in the world of architecture working as a curator is a small niche. One reason I am so happy to receive Nykredit’s Honorary Award is that it places a new focus on the role of the curator of architecture as an important communicator of architecture.’

Karen Kjærgaard temporarily exhibited in an everyday object.

She is also given the award based on her long career. A career that began at Aarhus School of Architecture in 1981, at a time when the education was radically different from today.

‘We used to discuss everything, and there was hardly any teaching to speak of. This meant that after one year of studying you were quite frustrated. What was the aim? No one told us. You weren’t told about the big picture until at the critiques. It was learning by doing, the hard way. If you exposed students to a similar didactic approach today, they would definitely object.’

Karen was able to find her own way forward. During her third year of studies, she formulated a manifesto that broke with the one-sided focus on the Danish design tradition and pointed towards her final project, which ended up on the cover of Politiken’s culture section and on television.

Hot dog stand with neon

Karen designed a stainless steel hot dog stand with a light blue fibreglass roof and neon all the way around it. A project that was, at the time, unheard of and highly provocative.

‘I was on the “Furniture and Rooms” track. Where most students were nice girls who designed cabinets for storing tablecloths and nice furniture for nice homes. This was why people thought engaging with something as popular and common as a hot dog was provocative, unaesthetic, and amounted to taking a step down.’

The result was a radically different project involving sections, 1:1 drawings, and a model in a 1:5 scale.

A butterfly at Friis & Moltke

Karen was an intern at the Friis og Moltke design studio at a time when the old celebrated architects were still part of the design studio’s everyday life. The students were called butterflies (sommerfugle). It was a time when there was a visible hierarchy but also great opportunities if you were able to seize them.

‘I was placed between Moltke and Rix. Everyone was very outspoken and direct. But there was also much room for big ideas – in every possible way. Nothing was impossible, and it was a great time of my life that has shaped me professionally. And I created many exhibitions together with Rix. The directness and the brutalist architecture suited my West Jutland temperament.’

Exhibitions are architecture

Karen was employed by the studio after graduating in January 1987. But already next year, she moved to Italy, where she lived for two years. It was during the mid-1990s she really began creating exhibitions in her own name. To begin with, they were mostly of a commercial nature, e.g. trade fairs, but later she also arranged them for museums and institutions. Here the curatorial aspect was more important.

‘As a discipline, working with exhibitions is similar to working with architecture. It is all about light, spaces, materials, graphics, tectonics – and communicating your message. The difference is that you work with the temporary as part of what I call the architecture of the moment’, says Karen Kjærgaard.

Intuition and a good eye for the art of the possible

This is how she describes her core task as a curator: understanding the needs of others and supporting a message, regardless whether you are communicating to a wide or narrow audience. The leap to creating exhibitions of a more academic nature, focusing on research and didactics at Aarhus School of Architecture, where she was employed as a curator in 2012, after twenty years of independent practice, was therefore not as big as you might think; the approach and the challenges were the same, even though the content was new.

‘I had no plans of returning to the school, but my work at the school has offered a wealth of professional challenges, and much freedom – and also many opportunities to cooperate with students and colleagues. All part of my attempts to create a culture around exhibiting. The work of a curator is the result of combining other people’s work in new ways. This means you need to have a little humility. At the same time, you have to communicate what you exhibit in a way that makes it possible to understand it in new ways. I do this by experimenting and testing without conceiving of an end result in advance. Much of my work therefore also involves intuition and keeping an eye on the art of the possible. And I love working ‘on the floor,’ constructing something physical alongside the students.’

Disguised as mink

Karen’s pragmatic approach to her work developed further during the 90s when she managed to persuade 12 large companies to produce the furniture she had designed for the solo exhibitions My Private Home Collection and, later, My Private Garden. Furniture that was exhibited at the Danish Design Centre, Trapholt, the Danish Museum of Art and Design, and in Switzerland.

The companies each contributed a product that matched their skills but in a completely different context. This made it possible for her to finance these major and crucial exhibitions; exhibitions that attracted great attention.

‘All the pieces of furniture were comments on my daily life and my roles as an independent architect, assisting wife, and stay-at-home housewife. All the housewife’s tools were transformed into critical comments: The sweeping tray was transformed into a sweeping tray chair, the broom into a table, the scourer sponge into a bed, and Mother’s apron was created in white mink fur by Birger Christensen. The sequel, My Private Garden, afforded a critical and humorous look at our strained relationship with nature through Weber grills resembling UFOs and blue garden tents.

You have to make a living

Karen’s work has always been located at the intersection of art, architecture, and design, like when she was co-curator of the exhibition Danish Design At the House, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Sydney Opera House in 2013. Or when she was the prime mover behind MINDCRAFT, Danish Crafts, and The Ministry of Culture’s major initiative in Milan, which she curated from 2008 to 2010.

‘The idea of grafting art and design onto architecture has its origins in my time with Friis & Moltke. But in a way, it is part of my DNA: growing up in a commercial environment mixed with a good measure of art and soul. You had to make a living, but music and design were just as important.’

Play and seriousness

When, on 7 September 2023, Karen Kjærgaard and her team kick off OPEN, this year’s architecture festival at Aarhus School of Architecture, she will be following the very same recipe: a strong awareness of the financial framework and a clear vision for the content.

‘It is important that with OPEN, we create a new kind of criticality that we can translate into learning to avoid the programme ending up as a simple transfer of information, pure aesthetics, or irrelevant power points. I want to do more with architecture. At the end of the day, it is, of course, a matter of funding. You have a budget, and you then have to get the most value for that money. There are many things that need to come together. And the result should preferably take us to somewhere new. In this way, my work as a curator is both rewarding and a privilege, and my days are never boring.’

Facts

Karen Kjærgaard has created two major solo exhibitions: My Private Home Collection (2002) and My Private Garden (2005). She has a master’s in curation from Aarhus University (2021).
You can learn more about her CV and activities by visiting her website.
During the week, Karen Kjærgaard lives in Aarhus, but you will often find her at her self-built holiday cottage at Odden, which, according to the Danish magazine Bo Bedre, looks like something out of a dream.
Learn more about the OPEN Architecture Festival and buy your ticket.